Senior Software Engineer - Build Platform

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 in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. However, 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.

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:

• Developing self-service infrastructure from the ground up to empower our engineering teams to work more efficiently.
• Working across CI/CD, build systems, test frameworks, cloud providers, and other developer-related domains as necessary to ensure Canva’s engineering teams continue to scale with the demands of the product suite.
• Working with product engineering teams to ensure build-related best practices and tools are rolled out in every service across the whole organization.
• Designing, building, and optimising developer workflows to build, test, and deploy a monorepo architecture.
• Participating in solution design meetings, hiring interviews, and code reviews.
• Working to improve/maintain internal developer experience platforms that empower engineers to work efficiently.

You're probably a match if

• You have a passion for developer tools and build systems, and enjoy using your imagination to develop solutions that supercharge the way Canva engineers deliver features to our users.
• You have strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• You are proficient in one of the following programming languages: Python/Java/ GoLang.
• You have experience maintaining and improving a large monorepo build infrastructure (bonus points if you have previously worked with Bazel).
• You are willing to dive deep and resolve gnarly build or runtime errors from time to time.
• You can guide and mentor other members within the team and improve the way we collaborate, learn, and share ideas.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills, both in technical and non-technical language.
• You thrive on teamwork, love being a team player, and enjoy mixing it up with folks from all walks of work life!

About the Team

The Build Platform Team at Canva is dedicated to maintaining fast and reliable builds for all Canva engineers. The team focuses on creating systems that are simple and user-friendly on the outside, while managing complexity internally. This approach ensures that users can interact seamlessly with the technology without being overwhelmed by its intricacies. The team emphasizes pragmatic solutions, scalability, modularity, and reliable quality solutions.

Canva runs a large-scale Bazel monorepo, and the Build Platform team is what keeps it fast as it grows. We're scaling our remote execution infrastructure to remove the compute bottlenecks that show up as that graph keeps growing, and extending first-class Bazel support to systems languages like Rust, React Native and C++ so teams building performance-critical software and web-first toolchain.

Looking ahead, the roadmap gets even more interesting: we're rethinking how Bazel represents target platforms so builds can take advantage of real hardware differences, deepening IDE integration so the day to day developer experience feels seamless, and reworking our frontend build pipeline, including native support for WebAssembly, to keep pace as Canva's product surface keeps expanding. It's systems engineering with outsized leverage: every improvement this team ships gets multiplied across thousands of engineers, every single day.

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 support you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

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. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect. 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.