Staff Frontend Engineer, Editing Performance - Design experience

Company Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time-consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect. This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you'd be doing in this role

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

Performance is fundamental to Canva's editing experience. As we grow, our editor needs to remain fast, smooth and reliable across different devices, networks and increasingly complex designs.

The Editing Performance team is rebuilding foundational parts of Canva's editor architecture, primarily in TypeScript with a growing amount of React Native and native development. You'll have the opportunity to work deep in the foundations of the editor, helping it perform at scale while making it easier for engineering teams across Canva to build performant experiences.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Designing, developing and deploying software solutions, partnering closely with engineering leads, designers and product managers to deliver experiences for Canva's global community.
• Working primarily in TypeScript as we rebuild core parts of the editor, with opportunities to work across React Native and native surfaces.
• Driving measurable performance improvements across the editor, using performance data and instrumentation to understand problems, prioritise opportunities and demonstrate impact.
• Building tools, frameworks and libraries that empower other engineers at Canva to create performant features.
• Taking ownership of complex technical problems, breaking larger initiatives into achievable pieces and driving work from idea through to delivery.
• Sharing technical knowledge and identifying opportunities to collaborate across teams on improvements that help us achieve our goals.

You're probably a match if

• You have strong commercial software engineering experience and have worked on complex, large-scale applications, SDKs or APIs.
• You have deep TypeScript experience and are comfortable navigating large, long-lived codebases, including reasoning about systems and types you didn't originally build.
• You've contributed to architecture decisions and enjoy solving complex engineering problems rather than simply building within established patterns.
• You're comfortable working with performance data — instrumenting metrics, interpreting dashboards and using evidence to prioritise work and demonstrate impact.
• You bring strong computer science and engineering fundamentals, including asynchronous programming, data structures, solution design, architecture and design patterns.
• You're curious about how software performs under the hood. Experience with browser rendering, event handling, WebWorkers or WebGL/WebGPU is a strong plus, while familiarity with native rendering pipelines or JavaScript engine internals is a bonus.
• You communicate clearly, collaborate effectively and enjoy sharing knowledge while helping others solve difficult technical problems.

About the team

The Editing Group builds the core design experience at the heart of Canva. We work across the systems that make editing intuitive, responsive and scalable, tackling challenges spanning rendering performance, interactive design experiences and seamless cross-platform editing.

Within Editing, the Editing Performance team focuses on making sure performance never gets in the way of creativity. We improve page load and interaction performance, tackle memory and reliability challenges, build the measurement systems that help teams understand performance, and create frameworks that empower engineers across Canva to make performance part of how they build.

Our ambition is simple but challenging: Canva's editor should perform brilliantly regardless of platform, device, network or design complexity.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard — and we do — but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• 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 support you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva, so even if you don't feel like your skills quite match what's listed above — we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.