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Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Audio & Video Platform team within the Media Product Platform group. This role focuses on building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers video ingestion, transcoding, storage, processing, and delivery across Canva's platform, serving millions of users globally.
You will develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools that power Canva's audio and video processing platform. Key responsibilities include designing and implementing distributed systems that efficiently handle multimedia content at scale, collaborating with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable exceptional video editing and playback experiences, and optimizing multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. You'll also build new platform capabilities supporting Canva's growing video and multimedia ecosystem, drive engineering excellence through testing and code reviews, and troubleshoot complex production challenges.
The team's mission is to create an efficient, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable video hosting and delivery platform without compromising video quality. Your work will directly enable product teams to build world-class video editing and playback experiences.
Canva operates on a hybrid model from its Sydney campus in Surry Hills, with flexibility to work remotely and collaborate in-person when it matters most.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++
- Deep grounding in computer science and software engineering fundamentals: concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, architecture, and design patterns
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and services in production environments
- Highly skilled at 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 experience processing multimedia content at massive scale
- Experience with modern video codecs (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1)
- Deep experience with multimedia frameworks and libraries such as FFmpeg and/or GStreamer, including source-level debugging, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development
- Track record building large-scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery systems
- Strong understanding of multimedia containers and formats such as MP4 and WebM
NICE TO HAVE:
- Contributions to FFmpeg, GStreamer, or other open-source multimedia projects
- Experience optimizing video playback through adaptive bitrate streaming (DASH, HLS, CMAF)
- Experience tuning encoding pipelines for video quality and delivery performance
- Experience with Java-based services in large-scale distributed environments
