Staff Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Canva's Product Insights Enablement team as a Staff Software Engineer and play a leading role in defining the technical roadmap and architecture for internal product decisioning platforms. You will advocate for best practices, propose innovative solutions, and engage with others to shape improvements. This leadership position requires extensive experience in distributed web applications, architectural changes, and mentoring engineering teams. Canva offers flexible work arrangements, equity packages, inclusive parental leave, a wellbeing allowance, and flexible leave options. The role involves shaping the vision of platforms, partnering with other leads, and building impactful solutions to empower informed product decisions.

Requirements

• Extensive experience developing distributed web applications on the JVM, with a deep understanding of Java (other JVM languages like Scala or Kotlin are a plus, though we primarily use Java 17)
• A track record of successfully planning and executing complex architectural changes, with a strong focus on creative problem-solving rather than reliance on specific frameworks or libraries
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to foster a positive working environment across stakeholders and engineers
• Proven experience mentoring and guiding engineering teams, unblocking technical challenges, and serving as a role model
• Mastery of computer science and engineering fundamentals such as concurrency, data structures, and distributed systems, along with a strong grasp of resiliency techniques like load balancing, throttling, back pressure, and circuit breaking
• Hands-on experience working in large distributed cloud environments (AWS preferred) and familiarity with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform

Responsibilities

• Play a leading role in defining the technical roadmap and architecture for the services powering our internal platforms for product decisioning
• Advocate for best practices that enhance service performance, resilience, and adaptability
• Establish yourself as an expert in developing platforms that facilitate decision-making while being deeply integrated with the company's data ecosystem
• Propose innovative approaches and solutions to future-proof Canva's product decision platforms and deliver on business outcomes
• Engage with others to shape the improvements through writing design documents and running design meetings
• Design and implement the most intricate aspects of the system, showcasing your aptitude for tackling complex technical challenges effectively
• Guide the implementation of major projects, planning task breakdown and keeping engineers in sync using excellent verbal and written communication skills, including architectural diagrams
• Provide guidance and mentorship to other engineers, assisting them in their professional development and helping them navigate technical challenges
• Have a widespread impact across the organization by facilitating and orchestrating cross-team initiatives that set a higher standard for reliability, velocity, and security

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale distributed data processing systems (e.g., Snowflake, Clickhouse) and expertise in SQL and data modeling best practices
• Experience working with interface design tooling
• Understanding the concept of AB testing and experimentation
• Experience in full-stack 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