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 experience developing distributed web applications, strong communication skills, and the ability to guide and mentor other engineers. Canva offers flexible work arrangements, 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 at scale.

Requirements

• Experience developing distributed web applications on the JVM; experience writing Java (experience with other JVM languages such as Scala, Kotlin, etc is a plus - however, we primarily use Java 17)
• Experience with planning, executing architectural changes, and a creative and conceptual problem-solving approach as opposed to a framework or library focused
• Strong communication and teamwork skills, both written and verbal
• Facilitating collaboration and fostering a positive working relationship between stakeholders and engineers, promoting a culture of trust, respect, and open communication
• Experience with guiding and mentoring other engineers, helping unblock technical challenges and being an all-around role model
• Deep knowledge of computer science and engineering fundamentals: concurrency, data structures, and distributed systems. And an understanding of resiliency techniques and patterns - load balancing, throttling, back pressure, circuit breaking, etc

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 working in large distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS), experience with cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform is a plus
• Experience working with large distributed data processing systems (e.g. Snowflake, Clickhouse), knowledge of SQL and data modelling best practices is a plus
• Experience building AI powered applications is a plus

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