Backend Engineer - International SG (Generative AI)

You’ll be joining the Product Enablement team, part of Canva’s International Supergroup. Our mission is to help Canva expand into new markets by building systems that enable truly local experiences for users around the world. We work closely with teams across product, engineering, and growth to bring AI-powered experiences to China with the right balance of product quality, technical scalability, and local-market fit.

About the Role

As a backend engineer in our team, you’ll contribute to building reliable, scalable backend systems that support Canva’s AI-powered experiences in China. Our work directly supports Canva’s company goal of achieving Truly Local Market Excellence, helping drive user growth and retention in diverse global markets. You will contribute to projects, discover opportunities and drive experiments. This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced engineer who knows how to both communicate well and design systems and components that balance simplicity and flexibility. You’ll help solve practical problems involved in bringing AI systems into production in a local market context, while collaborating with a broad set of teams across Canva.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Build and maintain reliable, scalable backend services that support Canva’s generative AI experiences in China.
• Design and implement APIs, service integrations, and internal abstractions for AI-powered product capabilities.
• Integrate backend systems with global and local AI services, model providers, and supporting infrastructure.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to deliver useful and high-quality AI experiences.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of APIs and backend systems that comply with privacy and security standards across different markets.
• Support experimentation and phased rollouts to improve the quality, reliability, and user impact of AI-powered experiences in China and other priority international markets.
• Participate in code reviews and share knowledge to help maintain a high-quality engineering culture.
• Investigate and fix bugs, improve performance, and proactively address technical debt.

What we're looking for

You’re a backend engineer with a proven track record of solving complex problems and delivering production-quality systems.

• Proficiency in Java and a solid understanding of backend development fundamentals (e.g., REST APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture).
• Experience building and maintaining scalable backend services in production.
• A strong focus on code quality, maintainability, and performance.
• A collaborative mindset - you enjoy working with other engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to solve problems together.
• A growth mindset - you’re eager to learn, take feedback constructively, and improve both your skills and the systems you work on.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP), CI/CD pipelines, or AI model integrations is a plus.
• Interest in or exposure to generative AI, LLMs, AI product integrations, or similar domains such as machine learning platforms.
• Fluent in English and comfortable working in a global context.