Staff Software Engineer (one level above Senior) - Video - Content and Discovery

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