Job Description

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus across the world and co-working spaces in numerous locations in the USA. But 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. You9ll work on Pacific Time hours and collaborate daily with Canva9s engineering teams in AEST.

What you9d be doing in this role

Canva9s Ecosystem platform sits at the centre of how the world9s agentic AI systems connect to visual design. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and the next wave of AI-native platforms are all building on, against, and through our MCP server, REST APIs, and Apps platform. The shape of those integrations is being decided right now, at the engineering layer, in real conversations with real technical counterparts.

• Drive decisions and alignment across Partners and Canva engineering. When a partner proposes a solution that won9t work, you9ll explain why, generate the realistic option set, and drive it to a decision with the owning Canva teams. You9ll hold the technical detail on both sides and translate without losing precision.
• Set technical direction for Canva9s external platform surface. The strategic question of where to invest, deprecate, and evolve doesn9t sit inside any single team. You9ll contribute to that direction, grounded in partner signal and engineering reality.
• Ground partner conversations in working code. At this level, partner conversations need to be grounded in what9s actually runnable. You validate proposed solutions against Canva9s real architecture to drive decisions that span multiple teams and partners, using working code as the proof point.. When it helps unblock a decision, you9ll sketch what a change could look like in code, giving the owning Canva team a concrete starting point while leaving the change itself to them. The outcome is a partner decision backed by a runnable artifact.
• Drive product-line engineering across our external platform surfaces. Canva9s agentic AI story is delivered across MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. You9ll work across all of them, making sure the overall surface stays coherent as new capabilities land. This is the product-line engineering layer that today falls between teams.
• Carry the platform direction outward early. Canva pivots on a dime. You9ll sit inside Ecosystem engineering leadership, hear direction as it forms, and carry it to partners before they9re reacting to it. This is the single highest-leverage thing the role does for GTM.
• Shape strategic partner and customer engagements. For a small number of flagship engagements (major AI platforms, and at a stretch, strategically significant enterprise customers), you9ll lead the technical relationship end-to-end: shaping the roadmap, driving the spikes, carrying the decisions back through Canva.

You9ll hold product shape, engineering feasibility, and partner intent in the same conversation. In a single afternoon, you might move between a product-roadmap discussion, an API design review, and a partnership alignment call, and bring each of them closer to resolution.

You9re probably a match if

• You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product.
• You9ve built developer platforms, not just evangelised them. You9ve shipped code in production on platforms used by external developers.
• You move fluidly between a product roadmap conversation, a system design discussion, and a partner negotiation, and you bring each one forward.
• You bring a prototype or sample code to a hard conversation. You don9t oversell what9s doable, and you don9t overbuild what isn9t needed.
• You9re technically deep on the modern AI platform stack. You have real opinions on MCP, tool-use, agentic API design, and the tradeoffs between them.
• You communicate directly. You resolve misalignments by writing clearly.
• You9ve worked inside product stacks that are heterogeneous and move fast. You know how to orient yourself quickly in a codebase you didn9t write.
• You raise the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering by sharing knowledge, feedback and bringing others into partner facing wins.

It would be great if you also had

• Hands-on experience shipping or integrating with MCP (Anthropic, OpenAI, Copilot, or Gemini flavours).
• Strong TypeScript, comfortable across front-end (React) and server-side JavaScript, and the ability to read a Java backend even if you don9t want to write one.
• A track record of turning ambiguous partner signal into crisp engineering decisions that Product and Engineering acted on.

Why this role matters

The agentic AI ecosystem is being wired together right now, at the platform layer, by a small number of people at a small number of companies. This role is one of the seats at that table on Canva9s side. What you help decide in the next twelve months will shape how the world9s most-used visual design platform shows up in the world9s most-used AI systems for years. If you9ve been looking for an IC role with real leverage on what gets built, this is it.

About the team

This role sits in the Ecosystem supergroup. Ecosystem owns Canva9s external platform surface: MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. Ecosystem is ~150 engineers (and ~200 people overall) across developer experience, apps, and platform APIs, plus a Solutions group that covers toolkits solutions engineering and Systems Integrators. This role works closely with the Ecosystem leadership team, and partners directly with our Head of Partnerships on flagship partner engagements.

What9s in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you9ll 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.

Here9s a taste of what9s 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