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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.
You will work across three potential domains depending on team placement: Developer Workflows (strategy for cloud development environments, IDE integrations, build performance, and AI-assisted tooling), Build & Deploy (evolution of source control, monorepo and Bazel tooling, code review infrastructure, CI/CD systems, and safe deployment at scale), or Observability (Canva's observability foundations across metrics, logs, traces, and exceptions).
Key responsibilities include:
- Identifying, scoping, and solving complex platform problems across multiple teams
- Driving initiatives from design doc through organizational adoption
- Defining tools, standards, and practices that become engineering standards at Canva
- Architecting high-leverage infrastructure that eliminates systemic friction for engineers
- Defining and delivering self-service platforms and CLIs that reduce dependency on platform teams
- Setting observability standards with monitoring, alerting, and health visibility
- Partnering with engineering teams to understand pain points and translate them into technical direction
- Advocating for engineering needs to non-technical stakeholders
- Mentoring engineers through code review and design feedback
- Participating in on-call rotation for critical platform services
The Developer Environment team owns platforms that power development for thousands of engineers daily, from cloud dev environments to IDE tooling and AI-enabled workflows. At the Staff level (B4), the role emphasizes 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 a hybrid model from its Sydney campus in Surry Hills, with flexibility to work remotely and collaborate in-person when it matters most.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Staff-level background in Platform Engineering with solid programming experience in Python and Go (Java or TypeScript a plus)
- Track record of leading complex, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end
- Experience supporting large engineering organizations (1,000+ engineers)
- Strong AWS experience (Canva uses AWS)
- Kubernetes experience at workload depth (autoscaling, pod lifecycle, scheduling, configuration in managed clusters)
- CI/CD pipeline experience: led and shaped evolution of complex pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, or similar)
- Experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar monorepo build tools (Bazel highly valued)
- Observability experience: implemented comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting in production
- Infrastructure as Code proficiency (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation) treated as production code
Highly Valued (Nice to Have):
- Release automation and deployment safety mechanisms
- Developer tooling or internal developer platforms at scale
- Open source infrastructure or developer tools contributions
- AI/LLM integration into developer workflows
- Build performance optimization or capacity/cost optimization
