Staff Software Engineer Video Content and Discovery

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey gday mabuhay kia ora 你好 hallo vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time-consuming and youre probably keen to find out whats on offer so well get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. Its a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate focus and connect. This role is based in Sydney and were looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What youd be doing in this role

As Canva scales change remains part of our DNA. But we like to think thats all part of the fun. This will give you a flavour of the type of things youll be working on when you start but this will likely evolve.

At the moment this role is focused on:

• Develop and maintain high-performance C services frameworks and tools that power Canvas 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 Canvas 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 Canvas video infrastructure.

Youre probably a match if

You have strong commercial experience building highly scalable secure and performant backend systems using C.
Youre 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.

Nice to have:

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.

About the team

The Audio & Video Platform team sits within Canvas Media Product Platform group. Our mission is to build an efficient scalable cost-effective and reliable video hosting and delivery platform without compromising video create the services frameworks and tools that power video ingestion transcoding storage processing and delivery across Canva. Our work enables product teams to build world-class video editing and playback experiences helping millions of users bring their ideas to life through visual communication every day.

Whats in it for you

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard and we do but youll 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.

Heres a taste of whats on offer:

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 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 dont feel like your skills quite match whats listed above we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time