Engineering Manager - Design System Experience

Summary

Join Canva and lead a cross-functional team to enhance its design system, focusing on intuitiveness, efficiency, and support for AI-powered workflows. Define team goals and a technical roadmap, collaborating with stakeholders and exploring strategic opportunities. Ensure team well-being and high performance while providing technical direction, mentorship, and actionable feedback. Set priorities, support team members' execution, and develop their growth plans. Refine team processes for effective delivery, review code and design documents, and potentially contribute code. The ideal candidate possesses people leadership experience, design system experience, curiosity about AI in workflows, a strong product mindset, and web application development skills.

Requirements

• People leadership experience providing constructive feedback to others and supporting other engineers to reach their goals
• Working with a design system or maintaining components other teams depend on, but an interest in the problem space goes a long way
• Curiosity about how AI can improve developer and design workflows
• A strong product mindset — ability to identify user problems and champion pragmatic, high-impact solutions
• Experience developing rich web applications, ideally Typescript/React/MobX
• Practical knowledge of data structures and algorithms

Responsibilities

• Leading a cross-functional team to make the design system more intuitive, empowering, and efficient for everyone who builds with it
• Defining the goals and technical roadmap for the team, informed by consumer needs and in collaboration with the team and stakeholders
• Driving thoughtful exploration of strategic opportunities — including ways the design system can support new AI-powered workflows
• Ensuring the team is happy and healthy, as well as high-functioning and impactful, to best deliver on goals
• Conducting regular 1:1s to provide technical direction, mentorship, actionable feedback
• Setting priorities for and supporting coachees with execution
• Developing growth plans for engineers on the team
• Refining team processes to ensure effective and sustainable delivery
• Reviewing PRs and design docs from the team, and may also contribute code towards delivery

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience successfully advocating for goals and driving significant technical changes through leading others and as an individual contributor
• Experience in stakeholder communication or internal advocacy
• Experience writing accessible code and reading detailed specifications (WCAG 2.2 AA)
• Cross-browser and cross-device development

Benefits

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally