Staff Backend Engineer

Job 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.

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.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Working responsibly with stakeholders using team tools (Slack, Jira, Github) and proactively identifying issues or requesting support

• Driving decision-making processes that match the importance and urgency of decisions, ensuring the right people are involved

• Fostering productive discussions with strong opinions weakly held, encouraging critical thinking and maintaining a high-feedback culture

• Collaborating with Product, Design, and Data teams to plan viable, desirable, and feasible solutions

• Building technical solutions using Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Terraform, and AI with high code review standards

• Deploying and managing services in AWS staging and production environments

• Improving reliability through testing, observability, monitoring, and deployment automation

• Participating in support rotations and incident management

• Evaluating and improving team processes through regular reflection and experimentation

You're probably a match if

• You have familiarity with full-stack JavaScript development, ideally around Node.js, TypeScript and PostgreSQL 

• You have strong experience building API-based backend services

• You have strong experience with AWS services (Aurora RDS, SQS, S3, Lambda, etc.)

• You have strong experience supporting SaaS products end-to-end

• You have experience with system observability, reliability, and CI/CD and experience with infrastructure as code via Terraform

• You have experience hardening application security (authentication, access management, encryption, auditing)

About the team

You'll join the Flourish Platform space, which is responsible for the core infrastructure and features that power our data visualisation platform. We work on everything from UI glow-ups for core user flows to designing backend services that process complex datasets to the infrastructure that ensures our platform scales reliably for millions of users.

Within the Canva organisation, Flourish continues as its own business, developing innovative data visualisation tools while contributing to the broader vision of making design accessible and data communication impactful.
We value collaborative problem-solving, a pragmatic approach to engineering, and a commitment to reliability and performance. You'll be working with a team that combines strong technical skills with a genuine passion for making data visualisation accessible to everyone.

This role as a backend engineer will be on a team with a mix of backgrounds. Each engineer has a distinct mix of frontend, backend, and infrastructure experience. Engineers joining this space need to be comfortable looking at frontend code, but this role needs significant experience with building backend systems and integrating with cloud services.

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.