Senior Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only)

Canva; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 262,000 - 329,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Health benefit plans

401(k) retirement plan

Parental leave policy

Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

Canva is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for Video Performance to own end-to-end performance across the video pipeline on web, iOS and Android. The role sits in a San Francisco-based, hybrid team that partners with the Native Video Engine, ML and Editing groups to reduce latency and improve frame stability.

The team values profiling, instrumentation and scalable telemetry, with opportunities to drive significant improvements in battery life and memory usage across devices.

Qualifications

• In-depth experience optimizing native performance for video/graphics pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Own performance across the video creation lifecycle: load, import, timeline, preview, effects, export on multiple platforms.

Skills

C++

Rust

Graphics APIs

Performance tooling

Profilers

Telemetry

Concurrency

Memory management

CPU/GPU costs

Tools

Perf

Instruments

Perfetto

Android Studio Profiler

Chrome DevTools

Job description

Senior Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only)

• Full-time
• Recruitment type: Permanent

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 office is in Sydney, Australia, but we've made our way from down under, to a hub in San Francisco, which is now home to our US operations. We offer flexibility in how and where 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 a flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

• Own performance across the whole video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects and export, on web, iOS and Android. When a bottleneck turns out to live in someone else's layer, you follow it there.
• Define the performance metrics and service level objectives for Video, and make sure they track what people actually notice rather than what happens to be easy to measure.
• Build the telemetry, tracing, dashboards and alerting that keep video performance visible, including regression detection that catches problems before users feel them.
• Build the profiling and benchmarking tooling: traces, device labs, automated performance suites. The goal is that any engineer in Video can diagnose a slow path without waiting for you.
• Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory and battery life. Sometimes that means a product or pipeline change. Sometimes it means critical-path work in the native engine, the shaders, or the ML-powered effect pipelines.
• Work with the Native Video Engine, on-device ML and Editing teams to rework hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration and asynchronous processing.

You're probably a match if

• C++, or another systems language such as Rust, used to optimise critical paths in a native engine. Plus a feel for how graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU) affect frame times.
• You've made real systems measurably faster, and you can talk through the numbers.
• You move comfortably between product code, backend services and native or platform layers, and you can find your bearings in an unfamiliar stack.
• You've built performance tooling that other engineers came to rely on: profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites or telemetry pipelines. You're at home in tools like Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler and Chrome DevTools, and happy to build your own when none of them fit.
• You can define a metric that means something, read telemetry at scale, spot a regression, and prove an optimisation worked.
• You understand concurrency, memory behaviour and CPU and GPU cost models well enough to explain why something is slow, not only where.
• You prioritise by user impact, starting with the journeys people use most on the devices that struggle most, and you can get performance work landed by teams you don't manage.

Nice to have

• Hands-on iOS or Android work focused on system-level performance: responsiveness, startup time, memory, battery and thermal behaviour. Experience with older Android devices is especially useful to us.
• A working understanding of video pipelines: codecs, container formats, and frame-accurate seeking and composition.
• On-device ML performance work, such as tuning inference latency with CoreML, TFLite or TensorRT.
• Contributions to open-source multimedia or graphics projects such as FFmpeg or Chromium.

About the team

The Video Group is a global team of rendering engineers, ML engineers and product people, spread across Sydney, San Francisco and Beijing. In San Francisco you'd be joining a small team whose job is to keep the foundation solid while the rest of the group builds quickly on top of it.

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.

• Equity packages, because we want our success to be yours too
• Health benefit plans to support you and your wellbeing
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• 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

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills, merit and business needs, in compliance with applicable local laws.

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.

At Canva we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience and our overall assessment of what we observed and learnt in the hiring process. The target salary range for this position is USD $262,000 to $329,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.