Staff Backend Engineer - Multimedia Platform (C++)

Xapply; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

Canva is hiring for a backend software engineer focused on scalable C++ services for our audio and video platform. You will design and operate distributed systems handling ingestion, transcoding, storage, and delivery of multimedia content at global scale.

Collaborate with product and design teams to create excellent video editing and playback experiences for millions of users. The role emphasizes performance optimization, reliability, and cost efficiency within a hybrid Sydney-based setup, with

Qualifications

• Strong background building scalable, secure backend systems using C++.
• Solid CS fundamentals: concurrency, memory management, data structures.
• Experience designing/operating distributed systems and cloud production.
• Hands-on with cloud platforms/services in production environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across engineering, product, design teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools powering Canva's video platform.
• Design and implement distributed systems for multimedia ingestion, processing, storage, and delivery at global scale.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable video editing and playback experiences.
• Optimize multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability and cost efficiency.
• Build new platform capabilities to support Canva's growing video ecosystem.
• Drive engineering excellence via testing, code reviews, and operational best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex production challenges and contribute to long-term evolution of video infrastructure.

Skills

C++

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Performance debugging

Communication

Tools

FFmpeg

GStreamer

H.264/AVC

H.265/HEVC

VP9

AV1

Job description

Canva is hiring for a backend software engineer focused on scalable C++ services for our audio and video platform. You will design and operate distributed systems handling ingestion, transcoding, storage, and delivery of multimedia content at global scale.

Collaborate with product and design teams to create excellent video editing and playback experiences for millions of users. The role emphasizes performance optimization, reliability, and cost efficiency within a hybrid Sydney-based setup, with