SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the portable libraries layer of its mobile platform. This role sits at the intersection of deep mobile expertise and systems programming—a rare combination that shapes how products scale across iOS, Android, and web.
The strategic bet is a hybrid stack with React Native at its core, supported by portable libraries written in Rust and C++ that run across all three platforms from a single codebase. Hundreds of millions of users open Canva on mobile devices, and the libraries you build will run underneath every one of them.
Key responsibilities:
- Define and build the portable libraries that run across iOS, Android, and web, shaping the interface, safety model, and ergonomics for engineers consuming them across every runtime.
- Write production-grade libraries in Rust and C++ that must be fast, safe, and reliable across every device Canva ships to.
- Work alongside other Staff engineers shaping the mobile platform's technical direction, with flexibility to focus on problems where your strengths land hardest.
- Stay hands-on with code rather than relying on whiteboards; the work is the work.
- Communicate clearly across the stack—the libraries you build will be consumed by frontend engineers who don't write Rust, so strong technical communication is essential.
- Engage in substantive technical debate with strong peers, bringing strong opinions and changing your mind when better evidence emerges.
- Set the standard as an influential individual contributor with no direct reports.
Success means the portable libraries ship to production and run reliably across iOS, Android, and web. The interface feels native to engineers consuming it from every runtime. The patterns you establish become the foundation that other mobile work at Canva builds on.
Canva's Mobile Platform group owns how Canva runs on iOS and Android. Client Platform (the broader group) owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and user-facing surfaces. The architectural decisions made here will outlast most systems built on top of them.
The role is based in Melbourne with a hybrid working model offering flexibility to work remotely and come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration.
Requirements:
- Production mobile software experience on both iOS and Android (not just one platform). Deep understanding of where the platforms diverge and how to write libraries that feel native on both.
- Shipped production code in Rust. The portable libraries are central to this role and live in the systems language layer.
- Operating at Staff altitude: experience walking into ambiguous work, defining the shape of the problem, proposing solutions, and experimenting.
- Cross-platform fluency: understanding what it takes to write code that runs well across multiple runtimes, including ABI boundaries, memory safety across language barriers, and foreign function interface ergonomics.
- Technical communication skills: ability to write design docs that other engineers act on and make system-language code feel native to mobile and frontend engineers consuming it.
- AI fluency: hands-on experience using AI agents in real work and a perspective on what changes for mobile and systems-level engineering when AI is part of the daily workflow.
- Technical knowledge in native interop (bindings between system languages and iOS, Android, JavaScript runtimes), mobile fundamentals (native iOS and Android depth), cross-platform architecture, system languages (Rust or C++), library API design, React Native runtime fluency, and deep CS fundamentals (data structures, complexity, hard problems).
Nice to have:
- Production experience evolving a mature mobile product onto a new architecture (live migrations).
- Open-source contributions to React Native, Expo, or the cross-platform mobile ecosystem.
- Mobile CI/CD experience with release trains and over-the-air updates at scale.
