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Canva is seeking a Staff Frontend Engineer to lead the Video Editor team's technical direction. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you'll remain deeply involved in coding while guiding architectural decisions and mentoring engineers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serving as the technical lead for the Video Editor team, advising on technical direction, reviewing design documents, and helping project leads land the right approach
- Integrating Canva's new native video rendering engine into the editor, moving away from CSS and JavaScript rendering to unlock new capabilities like adjustment layers and masking
- Working with a new data model built specifically for video, replacing the fixed-page model to enable more effects and flexibility
- Owning projects through launch, including monitoring, rollout, observability, and operational responsibility
- Setting engineering standards through code review, mentoring, and establishing best practices
- Starting with the Audio Studio team, then expanding across the wider Video Editor group
The Video Editor team owns the editing experience at Canva, including the timeline, video-specific features, playback surfaces, and video elements. Video is a major use case for Canva's community, and the company is rebuilding technical foundations to better serve this market.
Canva operates on a hybrid model from its Sydney campus in Surry Hills, with flexibility to work remotely and collaborate in-person when it matters most.
Requirements:
- Proven experience as a technical lead on an engineering team, with engineers coming to you for direction
- Hands-on coding involvement; writing code is central to your leadership approach
- Experience owning complex, interactive web applications used by many people, with ability to discuss what broke and how you fixed it
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript and React
- Ability to make architectural decisions that scale as products grow
- Systems thinking: understanding how frontend decisions impact backend and vice versa
- Serious commitment to operational ownership: measuring, monitoring rollouts, and ensuring projects are genuinely operational post-launch
Nice to have:
- Audio engineering or audio processing experience
- Video editing, multimedia, or content creation tools experience
- Real-time collaborative editing experience (OT or CRDT patterns)
- Graphics programming or WebGL
- C++ experience
- Design tools or creative software background
