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 Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect. This role is based in Sydney, and we’re 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 you'd be doing in this role
As Canva scales, change remains part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. This will give you a 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:
You're probably a match if
• You have strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++
• You're 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 Canva's Media Product Platform group. Our mission is to build an efficient, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable video hosting and delivery platform without compromising video quality.We 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.
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 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 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.
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.
