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Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Audio & Video Platform team, which sits within the Media Product Platform group. This role focuses on developing and maintaining high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools that power Canva's audio and video processing platform serving millions of users globally.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services and distributed systems for multimedia content ingestion, processing, storage, and delivery
- Design scalable backend architectures that efficiently handle video processing at massive scale
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable exceptional video editing and playback experiences
- Optimize multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency
- Build new platform capabilities supporting Canva's growing video and multimedia ecosystem
- Drive engineering excellence through testing, code reviews, operational best practices, and continuous improvement
- Troubleshoot complex production challenges and contribute to long-term evolution of video infrastructure
Required qualifications:
- Strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++
- Deep grounding in computer science fundamentals: concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, architecture, and design patterns
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures
- Hands-on production experience with cloud platforms and services
- Expertise diagnosing, debugging, and resolving complex performance and reliability issues
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and design teams
- Passion for audio and video technologies and multimedia processing at scale
- Experience with modern video codecs (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1)
- Deep experience with multimedia frameworks like FFmpeg and/or GStreamer, including source-level debugging and custom patch development
- Track record building large-scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery systems
- Strong understanding of multimedia containers and formats (MP4, WebM)
Nice-to-have: contributions to FFmpeg or GStreamer open-source projects, experience with adaptive bitrate streaming (DASH, HLS, CMAF), encoding pipeline optimization, or Java-based distributed services.
Canva offers equity packages, inclusive parental leave, annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing and setup, and flexible leave options. The Sydney campus is hybrid, allowing remote work flexibility balanced with in-person collaboration.
