SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Canva is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the technical direction and execution of its Mobile Platform, which powers the iOS and Android experience for hundreds of millions of users.
Mobile Platform is responsible for the foundational architecture that every product team at Canva builds upon. The team is undertaking a significant architectural evolution: transitioning from a web application running inside a native shell to a hybrid architecture built around React and React Native, supported by native iOS and Android capabilities and shared mobile infrastructure. The goal is to build once and ship native-feeling experiences across iOS, Android and web.
In this role, you will:
• Set the technical direction for Canva's hybrid mobile platform, making key architectural decisions about what should be shared, what should remain native, and how those layers integrate.
• Turn the architecture into shipped production code within your first few months, establishing foundations for performance, reliability and observability.
• Deliver a React Native surface live in production within six months, with stable capabilities and platform primitives that feature teams can build on.
• Lead Staff and Senior engineers across Mobile Platform through difficult technical decisions as the new platform takes shape, serving as the architectural anchor.
• Scale adoption across Canva by working with major product teams migrating to the platform, establishing patterns engineers trust and choose to use. Over time, you'll become one of Canva's technical voices on mobile architecture, influencing decisions for 800+ frontend engineers.
This is a rare, high-impact problem: evolving a mature mobile architecture while the product remains live for hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of engineers continue building on top of it. The decisions made here will shape how Canva builds mobile for the next decade.
You'll be joining the Client Platform group, which owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform and user-facing product surfaces. The work compounds in two directions: every team at Canva benefits when the mobile platform gets faster and more capable, and architectural decisions made here will outlast most systems built on top of them.
Note: This role requires relocation to Australia with work visa and relocation package provided.
REQUIREMENTS:
Experience:
• Built or significantly evolved a large-scale cross-platform mobile architecture in production. React Native and React are highly relevant; deep experience with Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform or another production-scale cross-platform stack is also compelling.
• Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture while it remained live and growing. Changing an existing system at scale is a stronger signal than starting clean.
• Demonstrated Principal-level technical leadership: set technical direction across multiple teams where the answer wasn't obvious, brought senior engineers and leaders with you, and had Staff-level engineers building against the direction you established.
• Shaped architecture beyond your immediate team, creating platforms, standards or technical direction adopted across multiple groups or a large engineering organisation.
• Remain hands-on and close to the code, comfortable working through hard implementation details, not just setting direction from a distance.
• Strong engineering judgement: reason from first principles, challenge assumptions constructively, and help make Canva's chosen architecture successful at scale.
Technical Knowledge:
• Mobile runtime: shared-code runtimes, native boundaries, bundle delivery and performance profiling on real devices.
• Deep fundamentals across both iOS and Android with strong instinct for where shared abstractions stop making sense.
• Mobile performance: performance, reliability, crash monitoring and optimisation at scale.
• Platform architecture: shared capabilities, libraries, abstractions and infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong engineering fundamentals including data structures, complexity and system-level trade-offs.
Nice to Have:
• Deep production experience with React Native and React internals.
• Rust or C/C++ for portable libraries that run across mobile platforms.
• Open-source contributions to React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Expo or the wider cross-platform mobile ecosystem.
• Mobile CI/CD: release trains and over-the-air updates at scale.
• AI fluency: used AI tooling in real engineering work with a view on how it changes the way mobile teams build and operate software.
