Principal Partner Engineer — Ecosystem
Canva · San Francisco, United States ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Principal
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Experience
- 10+ years
Canva · San Francisco, United States ·
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 campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus across the world and co-working spaces in numerous locations in the USA. But you have a choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals. You'll work on Pacific Time hours and collaborate daily with Canva's engineering teams in AEST.
What you’d be doing in this role
Canva's Ecosystem platform sits at the centre of how the world's agentic AI systems connect to visual design. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and the next wave of AI-native platforms are all building on, against, and through our MCP server, REST APIs, and Apps platform. The shape of those integrations is being decided right now, at the engineering layer, in real conversations with real technical counterparts.
Drive decisions and alignment across Partners and Canva engineering. When a partner proposes a solution that won't work, you'll explain why, generate the realistic option set, and drive it to a decision with the owning Canva teams. You'll hold the technical detail on both sides and translate without losing precision.
Set technical direction for Canva's external platform surface. The strategic question of where to invest, deprecate, and evolve doesn't sit inside any single team. You'll contribute to that direction, grounded in partner signal and engineering reality.
Ground partner conversations in working code. At this level, partner conversations need to be grounded in what's actually runnable. You validate proposed solutions against Canva's real architecture to drive decisions that span multiple teams and partners, using working code as the proof point.. When it helps unblock a decision, you'll sketch what a change could look like in code, giving the owning Canva team a concrete starting point while leaving the change itself to them. The outcome is a partner decision backed by a runnable artifact.
Drive product-line engineering across our external platform surfaces. Canva's agentic AI story is delivered across MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. You'll work across all of them, making sure the overall surface stays coherent as new capabilities land. This is the product-line engineering layer that today falls between teams.
Carry the platform direction outward early. Canva pivots on a dime. You'll sit inside Ecosystem engineering leadership, hear direction as it forms, and carry it to partners before they're reacting to it. This is the single highest-leverage thing the role does for GTM.
Shape strategic partner and customer engagements. For a small number of flagship engagements (major AI platforms, and at a stretch, strategically significant enterprise customers), you'll lead the technical relationship end-to-end: shaping the roadmap, driving the spikes, carrying the decisions back through Canva.
You'll hold product shape, engineering feasibility, and partner intent in the same conversation. In a single afternoon, you might move between a product-roadmap discussion, an API design review, and a partnership alignment call, and bring each of them closer to resolution.
You're probably a match if
You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product.
You've built developer platforms, not just evangelised them. You've shipped code in production on platforms used by external developers.
You move fluidly between a product roadmap conversation, a system design discussion, and a partner negotiation, and you bring each one forward.
You bring a prototype or sample code to a hard conversation. You don't oversell what's doable, and you don't overbuild what isn't needed.
You're technically deep on the modern AI platform stack. You have real opinions on MCP, tool-use, agentic API design, and the tradeoffs between them.
You communicate directly. You resolve misalignments by writing clearly.
You've worked inside product stacks that are heterogeneous and move fast. You know how to orient yourself quickly in a codebase you didn't write.
You raise the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering by sharing knowledge, feedback and bringing others into partner facing wins.
It would be great if you also had
Hands-on experience shipping or integrating with MCP (Anthropic, OpenAI, Copilot, or Gemini flavours).
Strong TypeScript, comfortable across front-end (React) and server-side JavaScript, and the ability to read a Java backend even if you don't want to write one.
A track record of turning ambiguous partner signal into crisp engineering decisions that Product and Engineering acted on.
Why this role matters
The agentic AI ecosystem is being wired together right now, at the platform layer, by a small number of people at a small number of companies. This role is one of the seats at that table on Canva's side. What you help decide in the next twelve months will shape how the world's most-used visual design platform shows up in the world's most-used AI systems for years. If you've been looking for an IC role with real leverage on what gets built, this is it.
About the team
This role sits in the Ecosystem supergroup. Ecosystem owns Canva's external platform surface: MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. Ecosystem is ~150 engineers (and ~200 people overall) across developer experience, apps, and platform APIs, plus a Solutions group that covers toolkits solutions engineering and Systems Integrators. This role works closely with the Ecosystem leadership team, and partners directly with our Head of Partnerships on flagship partner engagements.
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
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.