Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, 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 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: Setting Technical Direction: Identifying, scoping, and solving complex platform problems across multiple teams — including ones not yet fully defined Driving initiatives from design doc through adoption across the organisation Defining the tools, standards, and practices that become the engineering standard at Canva Building Platforms That Scale: Architecting high-leverage infrastructure that eliminates systemic friction for engineers Defining and delivering self-service platforms and CLIs that reduce dependency on platform teams Setting the observability standard for the platform — monitoring, alerting, and health visibility that works without being asked Leading, Collaborating, and Growing the Team: Partnering with engineering teams to understand pain points and turn them into technical direction Advocating for engineering needs to non-technical stakeholders Mentoring engineers through code review and design feedback Creating the conditions for your team to move fast independently — empowering engineers to make decisions and own outcomes Participating in on-call rotation for critical platform services You're probably a match if You have a Staff-level background in Platform Engineering, with solid programming experience in Python and Go; experience with Java or TypeScript is a plus You have a track record of leading complex, cross-team platform initiatives end-to-end — not just building and operating systems, but setting the direction others build on You have experience supporting large engineering organisations (1,000+ engineers) You have strong experience with AWS (we use AWS) You have Kubernetes experience at workload depth — autoscaling, pod lifecycle, scheduling, and configuration within managed clusters You have experience with CI/CD Pipelines: led and shaped the evolution of complex pipelines at scale (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, or similar) You have experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar monorepo build tools (Bazel experience highly valued) You have Observability experience: implemented comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting in production environments You have Infrastructure as Code proficiency: Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation — treated as production code Highly Valued (Nice to Have) Experience with release automation and deployment safety mechanisms Background in developer tooling or internal developer platforms at scale Contributions to open source infrastructure or developer tools Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into developer workflows Prior work on build performance optimisation or capacity and cost optimisation About the Group The Developer Experience (DevX) group makes software development at Canva faster, easier, and more enjoyable. Through three focused subgroups — Build & Deploy, Developer Workflows, and Observability — DevX provides the essential platforms, too