Senior Full Stack Software Engineer - Python and React/TypeScript, 12 months fixed term contract

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 campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have choice in where and how you work, 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:

• Software engineering: Drive initiatives or projects from discovery through production across the team’s system portfolio or new. Navigate complex stakeholder landscapes and coordinate with Product or business partners to deliver business-critical solutions.

• Architect scalable web applications: Design elegant, maintainable system architectures that balance immediate needs with long-term scalability. Make thoughtful technical trade-offs and guide the team toward sustainable approaches.

• Build advanced platform capabilities: Create frameworks, libraries, and reusable components that enable other engineers to move faster and solve classes of problems rather than individual instances.

• Write production-grade code: Author code that exemplifies engineering excellence across the full stack. Set the standard for code quality, testing, documentation, and operational readiness.

• Champion AI-assisted development: Help the team adopt AI coding tools effectively and responsibly. Demonstrate how to leverage AI to accelerate delivery while maintaining engineering quality standards. Share practical patterns, run sessions, and build team confidence in using AI as a force multiplier for production-grade work.

• Technical ownership: Conduct design reviews, provide architectural guidance, and help engineers across the team solve complex technical challenges.

• Mentor and develop others: Actively coach less experienced engineers through pairing, code reviews, and technical discussions. Identify skill gaps and help create learning opportunities for the team.

• Consult with business partners: Work directly with stakeholders from business orgs and other teams to understand strategic initiatives and translate business needs into technical solutions.

• Establish engineering standards: Define and document best practices for internal application development at Canva. Create or refine the technical standards, patterns, and processes that ensure quality and consistency as the team scales, maintaining pragmatic views and high throughput/velocity at all times.

• Drive operational excellence: Implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting. Lead incident response for critical issues. Conduct blameless postmortems and drive systemic improvements to platform reliability.

You're probably a match if

• You have strong computer science fundamentals and a track record of designing and delivering complex, scalable web applications end-to-end.

• You have expert-level proficiency in Python and React/TypeScript, and deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS and/or GCP).

• You have proven experience integrating enterprise systems, designing APIs, and architecting solutions that span multiple platforms.

• You use AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor) as a core part of your development workflow and can help teams adopt them responsibly.

• You have a track record of leading complex initiatives independently, aligning stakeholders, and driving them to completion with minimal guidance.

• You are an effective communicator who can coach engineers, conduct design reviews, and translate between technical and business domains.

• You thrive in ambiguous environments, make pragmatic engineering trade-offs, and take full ownership of systems in production.

• Bonus experience if you have a background building and maintaining internal platforms, eg. performance management or HR technology systems

About the team

The Technology Experience group is one of Canva's internal platform organisations, responsible for making everyone at Canva more productive and effective.

We are the Business Solutions Engineering team within Technology Experience, and our mission is to identify, build, and own transformative end-to-end solutions that automate or replace existing tools and processes, amplifying impact across the company.

We work closely with the People team and stakeholders across the business to ensure what we ship genuinely transforms how Canva supports its people. As a senior engineer on this team, you'll be a technical leader and pioneer - defining what great looks like, establishing engineering standards for our domain, mentoring less experienced engineers, and driving initiatives that have team-wide impact.

Other stuff to know

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We’re evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience - you’ll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect.

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.