Canva

Senior Backend Engineer - Export

Canva  •  Sydney, AU (Onsite)  •  1 month ago
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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.


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:

  • Partnering with our staff engineer to investigate and resolve complex Chromium issues — including upgrade breakages, rendering race conditions, and incidents caused by upstream changes
  • Owning the PDF accessibility post-processing pipeline and implementing features that add proper tagging and compliance (PDF/UA, WCAG) to exported PDFs for Enterprise customers
  • Building monitoring and testing infrastructure that catches Chromium changes before they reach production
  • Designing accessibility solutions resilient to Chromium's frequent output structure changes, so we're not constantly rebuilding
  • Contributing to broader export infrastructure challenges including format optimisation and distributed systems reliability
  • Documenting complex Chromium behaviour and architectural decisions to build team knowledge and reduce bus factor


You're probably a match if

  • You have deep experience with Chromium or another browser rendering engine
  • You're comfortable with C++ when you need to dig into complex third-party codebases
  • You're a solid Java backend engineer — that's what our product is built on
  • You've debugged layered systems where the problem spans multiple codebases and languages
  • PDF specification knowledge or experience with PDF generation and post-processing
  • A background in rendering pipelines, graphics programming, or print production systems
  • Experience maintaining systems where upstream dependencies change frequently


About the team

The Export team sits within the Editing Platform group and owns one of Canva's most critical workflows — transforming designs into downloadable files that users can share, print, and bring to life. Over 50 million people download their creations through us every week. We focus on three things: reliability users can count on, speed that keeps pace with their creativity, and flexibility across every format and use case.

Beyond the main download flow, we power print production, enable AI model training, generate thumbnails, and make sure every new editor feature works seamlessly when someone hits that download button. As a Senior Backend Engineer here, your technical depth translates directly into user delight — and your work enables teams across Canva to move faster and ship with confidence.

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.

Canva

About Canva

We're a global online visual communications platform on a mission to empower the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful on Canva on any device, from anywhere in the world.

Since our launch in 2013, we’ve had the crazy big goal of making design accessible to everyone. We were founded on the belief that people shouldn't need to understand complex software to unlock their creativity. We’re leveling the playing field and democratizing access to design and visual communication by empowering 100% of the world to communicate in a way that was once limited to the 1%.

We've always had a deeper mission surrounding Canva — which we talk about as our 'simple' two-step plan: to build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and to do the most good we possibly can. We're committed to our core value of Being a Force for Good, so as the value of our company grows, so too does our ability to have a positive impact on the world.

Industry
IT & Software
Company Size
10,000+ employees
Headquarters
Surry Hills, AU
Year Founded
2012
Website
canva.com
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