Senior Frontend Engineer - Editing Performance

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.

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:

• Designing, developing and deploying solutions and hands-on software development – working closely with leads, designers, and product managers to deliver features and experiments to our customers worldwide

• Primarily working on web frontend with Typescript, but may need to work with other languages and environments

• Facilitating knowledge sharing and optimally advocate for engineering needs to non-technical team members within the group

• Modelling initiative and ownership in achieving goals, improving processes and solutions

• Finding opportunities for cross-team collaboration to work on new insights and improvements that help achieve our goals

You're probably a match if

• You have commercial experience in a software development environment, ideally with experience in building internal/external SDKs or APIs.

• Our frontend stack consists of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, TypeScript, MobX, etc.. Experience in some of these would be valuable but is not required.

• You have firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including asynchronous programming, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns.

• You have an understanding of browser rendering pipeline, event handling, WebWorkers, WebGL/WebGPU would be a bonus, but not required.

• You have previous experience in working collaboratively with team members and communicating effectively.

• You have strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to break large projects down into smaller ones and deliver on them through others.

• You have a passion for performance debugging and benchmarking

• You have good written and verbal communication skills.

About the team

The Editing Performance team is responsible for making the Editor lightning fast and scaling it to support the growing number of ways that people are designing with Canva.

Editing Performance is a broad area. It includes things like page load, latency of interactions, jank/dropped frames, memory usage (and associated OOM crashes) and more.

Even more than that, we want users to feel that Canva is fast. Performance issues should never be a reason why we can’t launch a new feature or businesses are unable to use the product.

Our goal is for the Canva editor to be fast for everyone. All platforms. All devices. All network connections. All designs and doctypes.

On Editing Performance, we have a few overlapping streams of work:

• Measuring performance. This is critical to identifying areas to prioritize, tracking our progress and monitoring for regressions. This involves developing robust fit-for-purpose metrics, scalable frameworks and functional dashboards to provide a trusted foundation upon which we can make improvements and empower others.

• Improving performance. We tackle this by understanding the fundamentals of browsers, rendering and the frontend frameworks we use and pushing them to the limits. Sometimes this involves weeks of investigation and experimentation to find a one line fix, other times we need to completely rearchitect parts of the code.

• Empowering others to improve performance. Our team cannot be the only team responsible for performance of the editor - all teams need to factor in performance in their work and our goal is to empower others to be able to do this by sharing knowledge, lending our expertise, and developing frameworks.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.