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Join Canva's Developer Experience (DevX) group as a Staff Software Engineer focused on the Developer Environment team. You'll set technical direction for the platforms that power how every engineer at Canva develops, from cloud development environments to IDE tooling and AI-enabled workflows.
In this role, you'll work at the intersection of deep operational expertise and technical leadership. You'll be equally comfortable writing design documents and working in the terminal. Your responsibilities include:
**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.
**Leading and Growing the Team:** 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 your team to move fast independently. Participate in on-call rotation for critical platform services.
The Developer Environment team owns infrastructure that touches thousands of engineers daily. You may work across three domains depending on team placement: Developer Workflows (cloud dev environments, IDE integrations, build performance, AI-assisted tooling), Build & Deploy (source control, monorepo tooling, Bazel, CI/CD systems, release automation), or Observability (metrics, logs, traces, and exception handling).
Canva has campuses in Sydney and Melbourne, with co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. You have flexibility in where and how you work, with the trust to choose the balance that empowers you and your team.
**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, 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 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
- Open source infrastructure or developer tools contributions
- Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into developer workflows
- Prior work on build performance optimization or capacity and cost optimization
