Staff Software 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.

This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the centre of the biggest re-architecture in Canva's mobile history. Canva's mobile app has, until now, been a browser wrapped around web code. That's changing. The Portable Platform is Canva's move to a native-grade mobile experience — write once, deploy across iOS, Android, and web. Very few companies have attempted a migration at this scale, and almost none have had to rebuild the tooling and testing infrastructure that makes it possible at the same time.

Mobile Workflows is the newly formed team that owns that infrastructure layer. Three pieces that were previously fragmented across multiple teams; mobile development tooling, the automation testing pipeline, and quality strategy, now have a single home. This role sets the technical direction for all of it.

Within 12 months, the goal is clear: Canva has a unified mobile development workflow strategy owned by one team. Automation testing ownership models are rolled out. Shared quality signals are holding product teams accountable. Your contribution will be making the testing and tooling infrastructure that hundreds of engineers depend on, becomes coherent and reliable.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Own mobile development tooling. Architecture and roadmap for simulator and emulator setup, device orchestration, and CLI tools across iOS and Android — making the engineering trade-offs that balance short and long-term needs.

• Lead the test automation framework. Design and evolve the mobile test automation framework for synthetic and integration testing across platforms, scoping problems across teams and delivering projects that span multiple consuming teams.

• Set the CI/CD quality gating strategy. Proactively surface quality problems not yet defined by others. Protect Canva's longer-term mobile goals by getting ahead of issues before they land in production.

• Consolidate what's fragmented. Drive alignment across Native Infra, Cross Platform, and DevX to bring fragmented mobile workflows into one cohesive system. Manage the complexity of multiple stakeholders and keep teams moving toward shared goals.

• Codify the standards. Define and publish mobile testing best practices and methodologies across Canva. Your documentation becomes the reference other engineers build on — not just on this team, but company-wide.

• Build shared quality signals. Create company-wide triage workflows and monitoring for mobile development and testing. Set clear objectives and empower teams to own delivery and quality themselves.

• Mentor and grow the team. Rally mobile teams around a shared mission and ways of working. Give direct, actionable feedback and help attract and assess top mobile talent alongside the hiring manager.

You're probably a match if

We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these:

(You don’t need meet fit all of these, but the more the better, and if you join our team we’re invested in helping you grow)

• Mobile Platform Depth: Deep expertise in at least one mobile platform iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin) with working knowledge of the other and genuine experience with cross-platform approaches.

• Cross-Platform Development: Hands-on experience with React Native or a comparable cross-platform mobile framework, used in a production environment at meaningful scale.

• Testing Infrastructure Ownership: Experience building or significantly shaping a mobile test automation framework — synthetic, integration, or E2E — with evidence that other teams adopted what you built.

• CI/CD Strategy: Background in defining quality gating strategy or improving CI/CD pipelines. You've thought about mobile build systems, device farm integration, and what fast, reliable feedback loops look like at scale.

• Delivery at Scale: Track record of scoping and delivering complex, cross-team technical projects. You know what it takes to ship something that spans multiple stakeholders and still lands cleanly.

• Alignment Without Authority: Skilled at driving technical direction with teams you don't manage. You build buy-in through credibility and clear communication, not through hierarchy.

• Standards Setting: Your technical docs and practices have become the reference others build on. You write for the reader who hasn't met you yet.

• Strategic and Tactical: You can hold the 12-month horizon and the current sprint at the same time. Bo Dan described this as the defining balance for the role — detail and strategy together, not in trade-off.

Nice to have:

• Device Farm Experience: Hands-on with BrowserStack, Firebase Test Lab, or similar cloud device testing platforms.

• Bazel Familiarity: Experience working within a Bazel-based monorepo CI/CD environment, particularly at scale.

• Platform Transition Experience: You've helped a team migrate from one mobile paradigm to another — WebView to native, or web-first to cross-platform — and lived through the tooling challenges that come with it.

• Stakeholder Influence: Background in internal advocacy or technical communication across engineering organisations.

About the Group and Team

Mobile Platform's mission is to provide optimal platform support for mobile development, from ideation to deployment. The subgroup sits within Canva's Product Platform supergroup alongside Client Platform, User Platform, API Platform, and PIE. It currently has two established teams — Cross Platform and Native Infra — and Mobile Workflows is the newest addition.

Mobile Workflows owns the infrastructure that makes mobile development reliable at Canva: development tooling, the automation testing pipeline, and quality strategy. As product engineers shift from web-only to cross-platform development under the Portable Platform, they need tooling and testing infrastructure that keeps up. The decisions made here will shape how hundreds of engineers ship mobile at Canva for years.

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 supports you personally

Other stuff to know?

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We're evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience — you'll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side.

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.