Staff Software Engineer - Video - Content and Discovery

Canva; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Parental leave

Wellbeing allowance

Job summary

Canva is seeking a backend engineer in Sydney to help scale our audio and video platform with high-performance C++ services and distributed systems used by millions of users globally.

Based in Sydney with a hybrid work model, you will collaborate with product, design and engineering teams to advance video editing and playback experiences while ensuring reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Strong backend experience using C++ for scalable systems.
• Deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, data structures, and design patterns.
• Experience designing and operating distributed, scalable backend architectures.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms in production environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across product, design and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks and tools for Canva's audio/video platform.
• Design and implement distributed systems for ingesting, processing, storing and delivering multimedia content at scale.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers and designers to enable video editing and playback experiences.
• Optimize multimedia pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability and cost efficiency.
• Build platform capabilities to support Canva's growing video and multimedia ecosystem.
• Drive testing, code reviews, and operational best practices; troubleshoot production challenges.

Skills

C++ backend

Distributed systems

Concurrency & memory mgmt

Cloud platforms

Debugging & performance

Communication & collaboration

Multimedia tech

Tools

FFmpeg

GStreamer

Job description

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

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 Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect. This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. 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 remains part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. This will give you a 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

• Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools that power Canva's audio and video processing platform.
• Design and implement distributed systems that efficiently ingest, process, store, and deliver multimedia content to millions of users globally.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable exceptional video editing and playback experiences across Canva.
• Optimise multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Build new platform capabilities that support Canva's rapidly growing video and multimedia ecosystem.
• Drive engineering excellence through testing, code reviews, operational best practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Troubleshoot complex production challenges and contribute to the long-term evolution of Canva's video infrastructure.

You're probably a match if

• You have strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++.
• You're deeply grounded in computer science and software engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, architecture, and design patterns.
• You have experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures.
• You have hands-on experience working with cloud platforms and services in production environments.
• You are highly skilled at diagnosing, debugging, and resolving complex performance and reliability issues.
• You have excellent communication and collaboration skills and enjoy working across engineering, product, and design teams.
• You are passionate about audio and video technologies and excited by the challenge of processing multimedia content at a massive scale.
• You have experience with modern video codecs such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, or AV1.
• You have deep experience with multimedia frameworks and libraries such as FFmpeg and/or GStreamer, including source-level debugging, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development.
• You have built large-scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery systems.
• You have a strong understanding of multimedia containers and formats such as MP4 and WebM.

Nice To Have

• Contributions to FFmpeg, GStreamer, or other open-source multimedia projects.
• Experience optimising video playback through adaptive bitrate streaming technologies such as DASH, HLS, or CMAF.
• Experience tuning encoding pipelines to improve video quality, storage efficiency, and delivery performance.
• Experience working with Java-based services in large-scale distributed environments.

About The Team

The Audio & Video Platform team sits within Canva's Media Product Platform group. Our mission is to build an efficient, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable video hosting and delivery platform without compromising video quality.We create the services, frameworks, and tools that power video ingestion, transcoding, storage, processing, and delivery across Canva. Our work enables product teams to build world-class video editing and playback experiences, helping millions of users bring their ideas to life through visual communication every day.

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 — we want our success to be yours too
• 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.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.