Staff Software Engineer, Native Infra: Build & Release

Canva; Adelaide; On-site; AUD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Inclusive parental leave

Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own native infrastructure for mobile. You’ll shape the Bazel rules, monorepo migration plan and release tooling, building a reliable pipeline that scales across iOS and Android.

You’ll lead cross‑team efforts to unify tooling and raise engineering standards, with a long‑range view beyond individual projects. You’ll define what good looks like for build reliability and release safety, mentor engineers, and help Canva deliver mobile experiences at

Qualifications

• Build systems: deep, hands‑on expertise with Bazel, Gradle, or Xcode build systems at production scale.
• Cross-team delivery: a track record of scoping and delivering complex projects that span multiple teams — migrations, monorepo consolidation, or build infrastructure at scale.
• Mobile depth: strong native engineering background in iOS, Android, or both, with a real point of view on where cross‑platform tooling helps and where it doesn't.
• Release engineering: experience owning CI/CD or release pipelines that other teams depend on, not just contributing to them.
• Strategic judgement: you balance short‑term delivery against long‑term architecture, and you can connect an external shift in tooling to a change in technical direction.
• Standards setting: your documentation and technical practices have become the reference other engineers build on, not just something you wrote once.
• Technical knowledge: broad and deep understanding of mobile build ecosystems and tooling.
• Bazel depth: build rules, custom rule sets, and monorepo build configuration at meaningful scale.
• CI/CD pipelines: designing quality gates and pipeline stages that hold up as more teams depend on them.
• React Native builds: bundling, codegen, and native module integration inside a production RN pipeline.
• iOS build tooling: Xcode build system depth, including native iOS release configuration.
• Android build tooling: Gradle depth, including native Android release configuration.
• Release management: OTA updates, staged rollout, and deployment infrastructure for mobile apps.
• Monorepo systems: experience migrating or operating within a large-scale monorepo.
• Nice to have: Cross-language interop: native bridging or codegen automation experience across JS and native runtimes.
• Mobile performance: profiling and optimisation work on native or hybrid mobile apps.
• Platform advocacy: experience getting engineering standards adopted beyond your own team.
• Scale exposure: prior work on mobile products with a large, established user base.

Responsibilities

• Own the Bazel build rules, React Native bundling and codegen for production scale.
• Mature Canva's mobile release and deployment tooling, including OTA and staged rollout.
• Lead the staged migration of mobile repos into Canva's monorepo, maintaining build/test/release continuity.
• Set the quality gating strategy across the build pipeline and surface reliability issues early.
• Evolve the React Native build pipeline into a shared foundation for web and mobile.
• Coordinate across Mobile Workflows, Cross Platform, Build Platform and DevX to unify tooling.

Skills

Bazel depth

CI/CD pipelines

Monorepo experience

React Native builds

iOS build tooling

Android build tooling

Release engineering

Cross-platform engineering

Strategic judgement

Platform standards

Tools

Bazel

Gradle

Xcode

React Native

OTA deployment

Monorepo tooling

Job description

Canva is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own native infrastructure for mobile. You’ll shape the Bazel rules, monorepo migration plan and release tooling, building a reliable pipeline that scales across iOS and Android.

You’ll lead cross‑team efforts to unify tooling and raise engineering standards, with a long‑range view beyond individual projects. You’ll define what good looks like for build reliability and release safety, mentor engineers, and help Canva deliver mobile experiences at