Staff Software Engineer - Developer Environment

Canva; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Developer Environment to help steer the technical direction across multiple teams. This role focuses on building scalable platforms and defining engineering standards.

You will collaborate with engineering leaders, mentor engineers, and own on-call responsibilities to keep critical platform services healthy and resilient as Canva grows globally.

Qualifications

• Staff-level background in Platform Engineering with Python/Go.
• Experience leading cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end.
• Experience supporting large organisations (1,000+ engineers).
• Strong AWS experience and Kubernetes at workload depth.
• Led CI/CD pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite).
• Experience with monorepo tools (Bazel/Gradle).
• Observability practices across production environments.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across multiple teams and define engineering standards.
• Architect scalable infrastructure and self-service platforms to reduce friction.
• Define observability standards for monitoring, logging and alerting.
• Mentor engineers, review designs, and foster fast yet safe delivery.
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical platform services.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

TypeScript

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD Pipelines

Bazel

Gradle

Observability

Infrastructure

Job description

Staff Software Engineer - Developer Environment

• Full-time
• Recruitment type: Permanent

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

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 campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. However, 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.

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 the 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:

• Setting Technical Direction:
  • Identifying, scoping, and solving complex platform problems across multiple teams — including ones not yet fully defined
  • Driving initiatives from design doc through adoption across the organisation
  • Defining the tools, standards, and practices that become the engineering standard at Canva
• Building Platforms That Scale:
  • Architecting high-leverage infrastructure that eliminates systemic friction for engineers
  • Defining and delivering self-service platforms and CLIs that reduce dependency on platform teams
  • Setting the observability standard for the platform — monitoring, alerting, and health visibility that works without being asked
• Leading, Collaborating, and Growing the Team:
  • Partnering with engineering teams to understand pain points and turn them into technical direction
  • Advocating for engineering needs to non-technical stakeholders
  • Mentoring engineers through code review and design feedback
  • Creating the conditions for your team to move fast independently — empowering engineers to make decisions and own outcomes
  • Participating in on-call rotation for critical platform services

You're probably a match if

• You have a Staff-level background in Platform Engineering, with solid programming experience in Python and Go; experience with Java or TypeScript is a plus
• You have a track record of leading complex, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end — not just building and operating systems, but setting the direction others build on
• You have experience supporting large engineering organisations (1,000+ engineers)
• You have strong experience with AWS (we use AWS)
• You have Kubernetes experience at workload depth — autoscaling, pod lifecycle, scheduling, and configuration within managed clusters
• You have experience with CI/CD Pipelines: led and shaped the evolution of complex pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, or similar)
• You have experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar monorepo build tools (Bazel experience highly valued)
• You have Observability experience: implemented comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting in production environments
• You have Infrastructure