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Salary: USD 262,000 - 329,000 / annual
Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own performance across the entire video creation lifecycle. Video is the most resource-intensive feature Canva offers, spanning browser, mobile, native engines, on-device ML, and backend pipelines. In this full-stack performance role anchored in the client layer, you will define what good performance means for Video, build measurement systems to make it visible, and lead the work to move the metrics.
You'll work across web and mobile surfaces, the cross-platform Native Video Engine, the Effect Platform, on-device ML, and backend services. The core challenge is maintaining fast experiences for users on mid-range and older devices while the team continues adding AI features and high-fidelity effects.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning performance across the entire video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, playback, effects, and export on web, iOS, and Android. Following bottlenecks wherever they lead across layers.
- Defining performance metrics and service level objectives for Video that reflect what users actually notice.
- Building the measurement layer: telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting, regression detection, profiling tools, benchmarking suites, device labs, and automated performance testing so any engineer can diagnose slow paths independently.
- Shipping measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory, and battery life through product changes, native engine work, shader optimization, or ML pipeline improvements.
- Collaborating with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams to optimize hot paths for parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.
The Video Group is a global team spread across Sydney, San Francisco, and Beijing. In San Francisco, you'd join a small team maintaining the foundation while others build rapidly on top.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated track record making real systems measurably faster; ability to discuss the numbers.
- Experience building at the client layer (web, mobile, or native) with ability to follow problems into backend services or platform code. Quick to orient in unfamiliar stacks.
- Built performance tooling that other engineers relied on: profilers, tracing/instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites, or telemetry pipelines. Proficiency with Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler, Chrome DevTools, or willingness to build custom tools.
- Strong understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models; ability to explain why something is slow, not just where.
- Working knowledge of video pipelines: playback, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking, and composition (or appetite to learn quickly).
- Ability to prioritize by user impact, focusing on journeys people use most on devices that struggle most. Can influence engineering teams across time zones.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Hands-on iOS or Android development focused on system-level performance (strongly preferred): UI responsiveness, startup, memory, battery, thermal behavior, especially on low-end Android. Native app, player, or editor development experience.
- Proficiency in C++, Rust, or comparable systems language for optimizing critical paths in native engines. Familiarity with graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU) and rendering impact on frame times.
- On-device ML performance work: inference latency tuning with CoreML, TFLite, TensorRT, or WebAssembly performance optimization for heavy browser compute.
- Open-source contributions to multimedia or graphics projects like FFmpeg or Chromium.
