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Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own video performance across its entire creation platform. In this role, you will drive measurable improvements to how fast video creation feels for users on mid-range and older devices—the majority of Canva's user base.
You'll work across the full video lifecycle: template loading, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects rendering, and export, spanning web, iOS, and Android platforms. Your responsibilities include defining performance metrics and service-level objectives that reflect actual user experience, building telemetry and tracing infrastructure to keep performance visible, and creating profiling and benchmarking tools that empower other engineers to diagnose performance issues independently.
The role requires deep expertise in at least one technical layer—whether that's product code, backend services, native engines, or platform-level optimization—combined with the ability to follow performance bottlenecks across team boundaries. You'll ship concrete improvements to latency, frame stability, memory usage, and battery life, sometimes through product changes and sometimes through critical-path work in native engines, shaders, or ML-powered effect pipelines.
You should have a track record of making real systems measurably faster, building performance tooling that teams rely on (profilers, tracing, benchmarking suites, telemetry pipelines), and understanding concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models deeply enough to explain why something is slow, not just where. Experience with iOS/Android system-level performance, C++/Rust for native optimization, video codec pipelines, on-device ML performance tuning, or WebAssembly optimization is valuable. The Video Group is a global team spanning Sydney, San Francisco, and Beijing; you'd join a small San Francisco team focused on keeping the foundation solid while the broader group builds rapidly on top.
