Staff Software Engineer (Frontend)

About the Role

Join our team to redefine how the world experiences design by leading the technical direction for real-time collaboration features and integrating AI into team workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for real-time collaboration features and commenting at scale.
• Integrate AI into team collaboration flows to create seamless and smart experiences.
• Build shared infrastructure and frameworks to enable faster collaboration tooling.
• Write code hands-on while influencing product direction alongside PMs and designers.
• Make critical calls on latency, reliability, and data consistency in real-time systems.
• Share knowledge and level up peers through mentoring and thought leadership.
• Own system health and reduce tech debt with a proactive, long-term mindset.
• Drive cross-team collaboration and represent Editing Collaboration across Canva.

Requirements

• Experience leading large-scale engineering projects from concept to impact.
• Hands-on experience with real-time technologies like WebSockets or WebRTC.
• Strong frontend skills including React, TypeScript, MobX, and JavaScript.
• Solid Computer Science fundamentals.
• Strategic thinking ability to connect architecture to company-wide goals.
• Experience mentoring and raising the engineering bar.
• Comfort influencing senior stakeholders with clarity and confidence.
• Genuine care for building tools that improve team collaboration.

About the Team

The Editing Collaboration team focuses on empowering teams to collaborate effectively within Canva. We develop core features like commenting and real-time co-editing, and we’re exploring new ways AI can make teamwork in Canva even more intuitive. We sit within the Editing Experience subgroup, whose mission is to build delightful editing features that let everyone design anything with ease.