Senior Software Engineer - Performance Monitoring

Summary

Join Canva's Performance Monitoring team as a Senior Software Engineer and lead the charge in building tools, shaping culture, and guiding engineering practices to make performance a default, not a nice-to-have. You will be responsible for owning the end-to-end observability stack, crafting tooling that enables engineers to measure and fix performance issues, and championing a "performance-first" mindset. This role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure every surface feels instant. Canva offers a flexible work environment with options to work from the office, home, or a combination of both. The company is committed to providing a supportive and inclusive work environment.

Requirements

• JavaScript frontend expertise – Proven experience designing, building, and shipping rich JavaScript/TypeScript interfaces using React
• Full-stack fluency – Comfortable working across the stack, diving into Node-based services, data pipelines, and modern CI/CD workflows when performance demands it
• A data-driven mindset – You balance intuition with evidence, design statistically sound experiments, and let data guide your decisions
• Clear communication skills – You can turn a flame graph or p95 latency spike into a compelling story for engineers, PMs, and executives alike
• Stakeholder influence & “managing up” – Skilled at aligning priorities and driving action across product, platform, and leadership teams

Responsibilities

• Building the right tooling & infrastructure
• Designing and maintaining lightweight SDKs, dashboards, and CI/PR checks that surface key performance metrics like LCP, INP, and CLS
• Embedding OpenTelemetry standards and extending pipelines that ingest billions of real-user events daily
• Collaborating with platform and infrastructure teams to enable low-overhead metric collection through reusable libraries, CLIs, and tools
• Strengthening performance analysis & guardrails
• Rolling out “no-merge-if-slower” checks that statistically flag or block regressions, complete with developer-friendly diff reports
• Investigating systemic bottlenecks end-to-end using tools like Chrome DevTools and Lighthouse to reproduce and resolve issues
• Mining real-user and synthetic data to identify high-ROI opportunities to improve monitoring tools and uncover performance gaps
• Driving enablement & a performance-first culture
• Publishing guides and playbooks to help product teams triage and resolve issues quickly
• Leading technical reviews, mentoring sessions, and brown-bag talks to embed “fast by default” into engineering workflows
• Bootstrapping a performance knowledge MCP server and AI-powered chatbot to provide context-aware performance support across Canva

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep web-performance knowledge – Expertise in rendering pipelines, main-thread bottlenecks, network protocols, and the latest performance APIs
• Experience with large-scale observability & RUM – Hands-on familiarity with tools like Real User Monitoring, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Looker, or Mode—especially at high event scale
• Strong TypeScript skills – Comfortable writing robust, well-typed code across both client and server environments

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