Job Description

Video is the most resource-hungry thing Canva does. Every layer of it costs something: the browser, the phone in someone's hand, the native engine underneath, on-device ML, and the backend pipelines behind all of it. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Video Performance team, you'll own how fast all of that actually feels.

You'll decide what good performance means for Video, build the measurement that makes it visible, then lead the work that moves the numbers. That work runs across product surfaces, our cross-platform Native Video Engine, the Effect Platform, on-device ML and backend services. Deep expertise in one of those layers is a good place to start from. What matters most is being able to follow a slow user journey wherever it leads, and leaving behind tools that let other engineers do the same.

Most of our users are on mid-range and older devices. Keeping the experience fast for them, while the group keeps adding AI features and high-fidelity effects, is the genuinely interesting part of this job.

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 a flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

• Own performance across the whole video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects and export, on web, iOS and Android. When a bottleneck turns out to live in someone else's layer, you follow it there.
• Define the performance metrics and service level objectives for Video, and make sure they track what people actually notice rather than what happens to be easy to measure.
• Build the telemetry, tracing, dashboards and alerting that keep video performance visible, including regression detection that catches problems before users feel them.
• Build the profiling and benchmarking tooling: traces, device labs, automated performance suites. The goal is that any engineer in Video can diagnose a slow path without waiting for you.
• Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory and battery life. Sometimes that means a product or pipeline change. Sometimes it means critical-path work in the native engine, the shaders, or the ML-powered effect pipelines.
• Work with the Native Video Engine, on-device ML and Editing teams to rework hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration and asynchronous processing.
• Help the rest of Video treat performance as part of the product, rather than something to tidy up afterwards.

You're probably a match if

• You've made real systems measurably faster, and you can talk through the numbers.
• You move comfortably between product code, backend services and native or platform layers, and you can find your bearings in an unfamiliar stack.
• You've built performance tooling that other engineers came to rely on: profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites or telemetry pipelines. You're at home in tools like Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler and Chrome DevTools, and happy to build your own when none of them fit.
• You can define a metric that means something, read telemetry at scale, spot a regression, and prove an optimisation worked.
• You understand concurrency, memory behaviour and CPU and GPU cost models well enough to explain why something is slow, not only where.
• You prioritise by user impact, starting with the journeys people use most on the devices that struggle most, and you can get performance work landed by teams you don't manage.

Nice to have

• Hands-on iOS or Android work focused on system-level performance: responsiveness, startup time, memory, battery and thermal behaviour. Experience with older Android devices is especially useful to us.
• C++, or another systems language such as Rust, used to optimise critical paths in a native engine. Plus a feel for how graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU) affect frame times.
• A working understanding of video pipelines: codecs, container formats, and frame-accurate seeking and composition.
• On-device ML performance work, such as tuning inference latency with CoreML, TFLite or TensorRT.
• WebAssembly performance tuning for heavy compute in the browser.
• Contributions to open-source multimedia or graphics projects such as FFmpeg or Chromium.

About the team

The Video Group is a global team of rendering engineers, ML engineers and product people, spread across Sydney, San Francisco and Beijing. In San Francisco you'd be joining a small team whose job is to keep the foundation solid while the rest of the group builds quickly on top of it.

We care about getting the details right, and we think an experience that feels effortless is worth a lot of unglamorous work underneath.

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, because we want our success to be yours too
• Health benefit plans to support you and your wellbeing
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• 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.

At Canva we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience and our overall assessment of what we observed and learnt in the hiring process. The target salary range for this position is USD $262,000 to $329,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.

Other stuff to know

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.

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.