Localization Program Manager

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hello, 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

The buzzing Canva London campus features several buildings around beautiful leafy Hoxton Square in Shoreditch. While our global headquarters is in Sydney, Australia, London is our HQ for Europe, with all kinds of teams based here, plus event spaces to gather our team and communities. You’ll experience a warm welcome from our Vibe team at front of house, amazing home cooked food from our Head Chef and a variety of workspaces to hang out with your team mates or get solo work done. That said, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals and so you have choice in where and how you work.

About the Team

The Localisation group is responsible for the localisation of Canva’s product, marketing, and content as well as the tools, processes, and assets that make this mission possible; this also includes all of Canva’s acquisitions such as Flouris, Cavalry and Affinity. We sit within the International supergroup but we work closely with stakeholders across the whole organisation — from customer support and sales through to our AI features and the core editing product.

Localisation is made up of localisation specialists, designers, country leads and language managers who work across the business to achieve our mission of equipping all Canvanauts with the best practices, insights and processes they need to go global.
 

About the Role

Every month, more than 100 million Canva users create a design in one of the 110 languages other than English that Canva supports. The localisation specialty is made up of linguists, project managers, and designers distributed throughout the company with a mission of celebrating the diversity of our growing base of global users and making their Canva experiences delightful. 

This mission involves everything from developing a vision for the global user experience, through procuring translation services via agencies, to maintaining localisation infrastructure roadmaps. If you join us, you’ll be involved in all stages of the development cycle in world-class product teams.

This role will focus on integrating Affinity, Cavalry, and Flourish into Canva’s localisation processes, ensuring that our LOTE users can fully experience our suite of professional design tools in their own language. You will bring strong subject matter expertise and organisational skills to drive this work, collaborating closely with acquisition teams as well as the broader localisation group to identify best practices and unlock efficiencies across products.

What you’ll do

• Define and operationalise localisation strategies for newly acquired products, with an initial focus on Affinity and Flourish but a possibility to expand to Cavalry and Leonardo

• Align these products with Canva’s localisation standards, workflows, and processes to ensure consistency and scalability

• Partner closely with engineering teams to understand technical requirements, including how to localise Flourish from scratch and manage diverse content types within Affinity

• Map our user experience expectations into a localisation strategy that meets the needs of our Pro users in LOTE

• Curate and maintain high-quality localisation datasets to evaluate and benchmark AI/MT model performance across languages and content types

What we're looking for

• You have deep expertise in localisation, including AI-driven approaches (e.g. RAG, COMET, BLEU) and quality frameworks (MQM etc.)

• You have proven experience delivering complex programmes of work across multiple products, balancing diverse stakeholders, timelines, and KPIs

• User experience is our passion; you understand of LOTE user needs, you love going through user flows and listening to users first hand.

• You are able to identify opportunities to improve users’ experience, ideally gained within a SaaS localisation or internationalisation environment

• You love taking things from chaos to clarity. You’re a natural at understanding ambiguous, complex problems and communicating them briefly and simply to others through documents and visual communication

• No matter how crazy the goal, you’re up for it! You have a high sense ownership and resilience, with the drive to see initiatives through despite shifting priorities

• You’re great with tech (Atlassian project management tools, basic web development) and you write a mean doc

• Do you speak a European language? That would be huge plus

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard—but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connection, and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to support your success inside and outside work:

• Equity packages – we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that let you recharge or take time to give back

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.