Staff Technical Program Manager, Developer Experience

Canva; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Inclusive parental leave policy

Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

Canva is seeking a Staff Technical Program Manager to lead Developer Experience initiatives from Sydney. The role combines strategic planning with hands-on delivery across engineering and product teams, focusing on cross-functional programs, dependency management, and scaling developer workflows.

The role emphasizes leadership, clarity, and collaboration to accelerate delivery while maintaining high standards in tooling and platform evolution.

Qualifications

• Minimum 7 years of delivery experience in a SaaS environment, hands-on role.
• Experience shipping complex, multi-stakeholder programs used daily by engineers.
• Proven ability to lead programs with evolving scope, including AI-driven shifts.
• Excellent at managing technical dependencies, ambiguity, risks and cross-team challenges.
• Deep understanding of the software development lifecycle at scale, CI/CD, developer workflows.
• Experience with developer productivity tooling and workflows.
• Empathy for developers and ability to drive tool adoption.
• Clear, influential communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Identify opportunities to improve processes and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead planning with Engineering leads and Product Managers for strategic planning and delivery planning.
• Facilitate technical discussions and identify gaps in solutions.
• Drive delivery of large cross-functional programs with high complexity.
• Manage dependencies across groups and track cross-functional requirements.
• Unblock teams, manage risks, escalate issues, and drive timely decisions.
• Define processes to track delivery status and cadence reporting.
• Promote delivery excellence and build dashboards/roadmaps; uphold reporting standards.
• Build trusted relationships with leadership and engineering to improve delivery.

Skills

Delivery experience

SaaS

Program leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Stakeholder management

Communication

Delivery velocity

Tools

Devboxes

Code review automation

IDE integrations

CLI tools

Cloud-based dev environments

Job description

Staff Technical Program Manager - Developer Experience

• 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 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 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:

• Leading planning based on company-wide processes: partnering with Engineering leads and Product Managers to support Strategic Planning and guiding Delivery Planning including scoping, prioritising, estimating and managing capacity.
• Fully understanding the technical solution, being able to facilitate technical discussions with Engineering teams and help identify and close gaps.
• Leading the delivery of large cross functional programs of work with high organisational complexity.
• Managingtechnical dependencies across Groups and Supergroups: monitoring requirements for cross-functional work and facilitating dependency discussions.
• Drivingdelivery and unblock teams to deliver outcomes in a timely manner: managing risks and issues, escalating them as needed, and driving timely decision-making.
• Tracking and reporting on the progress of programs and projects: defining required processes for tracking delivery status and running regular cadences to manage delivery.
• LeadingDelivery processes as needed to promote excellence, increasingvelocity and improvingcross-collaboration: being an expert on delivery tools, exploring new methodologies, building dashboards and roadmaps, and upholding reporting standards.
• Building a strong and trusted relationship with the leadership and Engineering teams: this is crucial for effective leadership, influencing strategic decisions and identifying areas for improvement in delivery.
• Holding everyone accountable to their roles & responsibilities ensuring success as a team: this emphasises the TPM's role in ensuring clarity and adherence to responsibilities.
• Facilitatingcontinual improvement rituals to build the effectiveness of product development and engineering teams

You're probably a match if

• You bring a minimum of 7 years of delivery experience in a SaaS environment, this role is very hands on.
• You can demostrate experience shipping complex, multi-stakeholder programs that scale — ideally products or platforms used daily by hundreds or thousands of engineers.
• Proven ability to lead programs where scope is evolving rapidly — AI technology shifts faster than traditional infrastructure, requiring continuous re-evaluation of approach and vendor strategy.
• You excel at managing technical dependencies, navigating ambiguity and unblocking teams, proactively identifying and resolving risks, issues, and cross-team challenges to drive timely outcomes.
• Deep understanding of the software development lifecycle at scale, CI/CD pipelines, developer workflows, and what it takes to build for technical users.
• Experience with developer productivity tooling: code review automation, IDE integrations, CLI tools, and cloud-based dev environments i.e Devboxes etc
• Deep empathy for the developer audience; can put themselves in engineers' shoes and understand what drives adoption vs. resistance of new tools and workflows.
• You lead with clarity and influence, using your exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills to build strong relationships and keep teams aligned.
• You consistently identify opportunities to improve processes and foster better cross-functional collaboration, helping teams deliver more effectively together.

Have at least one of these:

• A user of AI coding tools like Claude, Cursor, or similar. Should have strong, experience-informed opinions on what works and what doesn't in enterprise engineering contexts.
• Familiarity with agentic AI patterns; multi-agent orchestration, workflow chaining, and autonomous task execution i.e Coder Tasks running in production Devboxes, Otter workflow bundles etc
• Direct experience building or leading AI-focused engineering tooling, or AI in platform/infrastructure contexts.

About the Infrastructure Supergroup
At Canva, the Infrastructure Group's focus is to make infrastructure easy for all the other engineering teams at Canva. We accomplish this by optimising existing solutions, developing internal tooling, promoting best practices throughout the organisation, introducing global infrastructure changes, and mentoring the engineering teams on how to do infrastructure - the right way. We work as a team to find pragmatic solutions to a wide range of performance and scaling problems to ensure Canva continues to grow and our users have smooth and seamless design experiences. This focus on long term growth is made possible by every engineering team at Canva owning the operations and infrastructure of the systems they design and implement.

About the Developer Experience Group

The DevX Group is part of Canva's Platform org, sitting within the Infrastructure supergroup. Our mission is to empower every engineer at Canva to build and ship software with speed, confidence, and quality. We own the platforms, tools, and processes that form the backbone of the engineering development lifecycle — from writing and building code to testing and releasing it. We provide the foundational infrastructure for build systems and code collaboration, enabling efficient and secure software development. We focus on creating a frictionless development journey by streamlining workflows, building and enhancing tooling, and defining standards across engineering.

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 & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports 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.

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