Senior Backend Engineer — Build Scalable Platform APIs

Canva; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Parental leave

Wellbeing allowance

Flexible leave

Job summary

Canva in Melbourne is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to design and implement scalable shared services and platforms that power Canva's product experiences at scale.

This role collaborates with Platform and Product teams to raise reliability, improve developer tools, and accelerate feature delivery across millions of users.

You will mentor engineers, shape architecture patterns, and help us maintain a culture of simplicity, reliability, and innovation in a fast-growing company.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building scalable backend systems in cloud environments.
• Proficiency in Java or other JVM languages (Kotlin, Scala).
• Strong understanding of API design and modular architecture.
• Experience with service frameworks, deployment pipelines, and shared libraries.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Excellent collaboration and cross-functional teamwork.
• Strong grasp of data structures and distributed systems scalability.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve core backend frameworks, shared services, and developer APIs.
• Design scalable systems that are easy to use, maintain, and extend.
• Partner with product teams to co-design abstractions that speed feature delivery.
• Contribute to service patterns, conventions, and tooling that raise engineering standards.
• Collaborate across Platform and Product teams to improve observability and workflows.
• Mentor engineers and advocate for simplicity, reliability, and innovation.

Skills

Backend systems

Java/JVM

API design

Cloud AWS

Collaboration

Distributed systems

Job description

Canva in Melbourne is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to design and implement scalable shared services and platforms that power Canva's product experiences at scale.

This role collaborates with Platform and Product teams to raise reliability, improve developer tools, and accelerate feature delivery across millions of users.

You will mentor engineers, shape architecture patterns, and help us maintain a culture of simplicity, reliability, and innovation in a fast-growing company.