Staff Software Engineer - Video Platform at Canva in Sydney, , Australia

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.

Responsibilities

• As Canva scales, change remains part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. This will give you a flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.
• Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools that power Canva's audio and video processing platform.
• Design and implement distributed systems that efficiently ingest, process, store, and deliver multimedia content to millions of users globally.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable exceptional video editing and playback experiences across Canva.
• Optimise multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Build new platform capabilities that support Canva's rapidly growing video and multimedia ecosystem.
• Drive engineering excellence through testing, code reviews, operational best practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Troubleshoot complex production challenges and contribute to the long-term evolution of Canva's video infrastructure.

Requirements

• You're probably a match if
• • You have strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++.
• • You're deeply grounded in computer science and software engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, architecture, and design patterns.
• • You have experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures.
• • You have hands-on experience working with cloud platforms and services in production environments.
• • You are highly skilled at diagnosing, debugging, and resolving complex performance and reliability issues.
• • You have excellent communication and collaboration skills and enjoy working across engineering, product, and design teams.
• • You are passionate about audio and video technologies and excited by the challenge of processing multimedia content at a massive scale.
• • You have experience with modern video codecs such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, or AV1.
• • You have deep experience with multimedia frameworks and libraries such as FFmpeg and/or GStreamer, including source-level debugging, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development.
• • You have built large-scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery systems.
• • You have a strong understanding of multimedia containers and formats such as MP4 and WebM.
• • Contributions to FFmpeg, GStreamer, or other open-source multimedia projects.
• • Experience optimising video playback through adaptive bitrate streaming technologies such as DASH, HLS, or CMAF.
• • Experience tuning encoding pipelines to improve video quality, storage efficiency, and delivery performance.
• • Experience working with Java-based services in large-scale distributed environments.

Skills

Required

• C++
• Concurrency
• Multithreading
• Memory management
• Data structures
• Architecture
• Design patterns
• Distributed systems
• Scalable backend architectures
• Cloud platforms
• Production environments
• Diagnosing and debugging

Preferred

• Encoding pipeline tuning
• Java-based services

Benefits

• 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.
• • Equity packages — we want our success to be yours too
• • Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and carers
• • An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup and 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.