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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 Canva's video hosting, processing, and delivery at global scale.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools for audio and video processing
- Design and implement distributed systems for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering multimedia content to millions of users
- 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
The role is based in Sydney with a hybrid working model that provides flexibility to work remotely while coming together on campus for meaningful collaboration.
Requirements:
- 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 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 at massive 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, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development
- Experience 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, 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
