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Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience (DevX) group, specifically the Developer Environment team. This role sits at the intersection of deep operational expertise and technical leadership, responsible for setting technical direction for the platforms that power how every engineer at Canva develops.
Key Responsibilities:
Setting Technical Direction: Identify, scope, and solve complex platform problems across multiple teams. Drive initiatives from design doc through organizational adoption. Define the tools, standards, and practices that become engineering standards at Canva.
Building Scalable Platforms: Architect high-leverage infrastructure that eliminates systemic friction for engineers. Define and deliver self-service platforms and CLIs that reduce dependency on platform teams. Set observability standards for the platform with monitoring, alerting, and health visibility.
Leadership and Collaboration: Partner with engineering teams to understand pain points and translate them into technical direction. Advocate for engineering needs to non-technical stakeholders. Mentor engineers through code review and design feedback. Create conditions for teams to move fast independently. Participate in on-call rotation for critical platform services.
The role operates across three potential domains: Developer Workflows (cloud dev environments, IDE tooling, build performance, AI-assisted tooling), Build & Deploy (source control, monorepo/Bazel tooling, CI/CD systems, release automation), or Observability (metrics, logs, traces, and exception handling). At the Staff level, the focus is on breadth across the organization—owning the hardest problems, defining patterns others build on, and navigating complex stakeholder landscapes while staying hands-on in code.
Canva operates with flexibility in work location. The flagship campus is in Sydney, with additional offices in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. Employees choose where and how they work to achieve their goals.
Requirements:
- Staff-level background in Platform Engineering with solid programming experience in Python and Go (Java or TypeScript experience is a plus)
- Track record of leading complex, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end—not just building and operating systems, but setting direction others build on
- Experience supporting large engineering organizations (1,000+ engineers)
- Strong AWS experience (Canva uses AWS)
- Kubernetes experience at workload depth: autoscaling, pod lifecycle, scheduling, and configuration within managed clusters
- CI/CD pipeline experience: led and shaped the evolution of complex pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, or similar)
- Experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar monorepo build tools (Bazel experience highly valued)
- Observability experience: implemented comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting in production environments
- Infrastructure as Code proficiency: Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation—treated as production code
Highly Valued (Nice to Have):
- Experience with release automation and deployment safety mechanisms
- Background in developer tooling or internal developer platforms at scale
- Contributions to open source infrastructure or developer tools
- Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into developer workflows
- Prior work on build performance optimization or capacity and cost optimization
