Staff Software Engineer - React Native Platform SME (AU remote)

About the Group/Team

Join Client Platform at Canva, where our mission is to ensure a delightful experience for every user on every device. Client Platform owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and the user-facing surfaces of the product. Hundreds of millions of users sit on top of what this group ships. Every Canva product runs on it.

Mobile Platform is the group inside Client Platform responsible for how Canva runs on iOS and Android. We're the team for engineers who care deeply about mobile performance, who want to shape how cross-platform mobile gets built at scale, and who want to own the next decade of how Canva runs on a phone or tablet.

The work compounds in two directions at once. Every team at Canva benefits when the mobile platform gets faster and more capable. And the architectural decisions made here will outlast most of the systems built on top of them.

It's early: the team's small today (five Staff engineers and one Principal) and growing fast, and a lot of the wider org is upskilling into React Native from other specialties to get there. That means real room to shape how the team works, not just execute an existing playbook.

What you'd be doing in this role:

Canva's mobile app is built on web technology today. We're moving to a hybrid stack instead: React Native and React DOM working side by side, so we get one shared codebase across iOS, Android and web, without giving up native-grade performance. The parts that genuinely need speed — video, rendering, streaming — run in Rust and C++.

This role is the team's React Native expert. You'll help engineers who've only ever built for the browser make the shift to thinking in React Native: knowing exactly where "it's just React, it'll mostly work" stops being true, when to drop into a native implementation instead, and how to make React Native hold up at real product scale.

It's a flexible role and still early days for the team, so what you focus on first will depend on what's needed most when you join — likely a mix of platform tooling, performance work, and building the wider team's React Native fluency.

You're probably a match:

We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better, and we're invested in helping you grow into the rest.

Experience

• React Native at real scale: you've worked with React Native inside a large company, on a product with genuine technical and product complexity

• Performance under pressure: you've hit and solved real React Native performance problems

• Credible technical expertise and leadership you can talk honestly about where React Native falls short, and you've convinced skeptics through weighing trade-offs and overcoming technical limitations

• Cross-team influence: you've changed how more than one team builds, through documentation, tooling or direct collaboration.

• Hands-on, recently: writing code day to day, with recent commits, design docs and reviews.

• AI fluency: you've used AI tooling in real engineering work and have a view on what it changes for frontend or mobile development.

Nice to have:

• Experience leading or influencing an organisation with a lot of contributors.

• Comfort with the trade-offs of Rust or C++ in a mobile performance context.

• Open-source contributions to React Native or the wider React ecosystem.

• Design system or component library depth.

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 stack 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.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.