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Canva is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Export team, which owns one of the company's most critical workflows: transforming designs into downloadable files. Over 50 million people download their creations through this system weekly.
In this role, you will partner with staff engineers to investigate and resolve complex Chromium issues, including upgrade breakages, rendering race conditions, and incidents caused by upstream changes. You'll own the PDF accessibility post-processing pipeline, implementing features that add proper tagging and compliance (PDF/UA, WCAG) to exported PDFs for Enterprise customers. You'll build monitoring and testing infrastructure to catch Chromium changes before they reach production, and design accessibility solutions that are resilient to Chromium's frequent output structure changes.
Additionally, you'll contribute to broader export infrastructure challenges including format optimization and distributed systems reliability, and document complex Chromium behavior and architectural decisions to build team knowledge and reduce bus factor.
The Export team sits within the Editing Platform group and focuses on three core areas: reliability users can count on, speed that keeps pace with their creativity, and flexibility across every format and use case. Beyond the main download flow, the team powers print production, enables AI model training, generates thumbnails, and ensures every new editor feature works seamlessly when users hit the download button. Your technical depth will translate directly into user delight and enable teams across Canva to move faster and ship with confidence.
Canva values diverse skills and backgrounds. Interviews are conducted virtually.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep experience with Chromium or another browser rendering engine
- Comfortable with C++ when digging into complex third-party codebases
- Solid Java backend engineer experience (Canva's product is built on Java)
- Experience debugging layered systems where problems span multiple codebases and languages
- PDF specification knowledge or experience with PDF generation and post-processing (preferred)
- Background in rendering pipelines, graphics programming, or print production systems (preferred)
- Experience maintaining systems where upstream dependencies change frequently (preferred)
