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Salary: USD 262,000 - 329,000 / annual
Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own video 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 role, you will define what good performance means for video, build measurement systems to make performance visible, and lead cross-functional work to improve it.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own performance across the complete video creation journey: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects, and export on web, iOS, and Android
- Define performance metrics and service level objectives that reflect what users actually notice
- Build telemetry, tracing, dashboards, and alerting systems with regression detection to catch issues before users experience them
- Develop profiling and benchmarking tools (traces, device labs, automated suites) so any engineer can diagnose performance issues independently
- Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory, and battery life through product changes, native engine optimization, shader work, or ML pipeline improvements
- Collaborate with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams to optimize hot paths for parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and async processing
- Foster a culture where performance is treated as a core product concern, not an afterthought
The Video Group is a global team spanning Sydney, San Francisco, and Beijing. In San Francisco, you'd join a small foundational team keeping the platform solid while others build rapidly on top.
Requirements:
- Demonstrated track record making real systems measurably faster with ability to discuss the numbers
- Comfort moving between product code, backend services, and native/platform layers in unfamiliar stacks
- Experience building performance tooling (profilers, tracing, instrumentation, benchmarking, telemetry) that other engineers rely on; familiarity with Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler, Chrome DevTools
- Ability to define meaningful metrics, read telemetry at scale, spot regressions, and prove optimizations work
- Deep understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models
- Skill at prioritizing by user impact, focusing on high-usage journeys on struggling devices, and driving performance work across teams you don't manage
Nice to have:
- Hands-on iOS or Android system-level performance work (responsiveness, startup, memory, battery, thermal); experience with older Android devices especially valuable
- C++ or systems language (Rust) for native engine optimization; understanding of graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU)
- Video pipeline knowledge (codecs, containers, frame-accurate seeking, composition)
- On-device ML performance tuning (CoreML, TFLite, TensorRT)
- WebAssembly performance optimization
- Open-source multimedia or graphics contributions (FFmpeg, Chromium)
