Principal Backend Software Engineer

Canva’s Commitment and Mission

At Canva, we celebrate diversity. We deeply believe that bringing together diversity of thoughts, perspectives and expression is key to building the best product, team and company. We look for many different skills and abilities, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. So, even if you don’t think you quite meet all of the skills listed or tick all the boxes, we’d still love to hear from you! 

Our mission at Canva is to empower the world to design and since launching in 2013, we have grown exponentially, amassing over 100+ million monthly active users across 190 different countries and a team of over 3,000 people… and the best bit is that we’ve only achieved 1% of what we know we’re capable of. 

Join us and design your future.

About User Platform:

As a principal backend engineer, you will be collaborating to build up and scale the backbone of Canva’s User Management: the User Platform.

The user platform team plays an essential role in keeping our services stable and scalable for our millions of daily users.
You will be involved in designing, building, and maintaining new features to improve and extend the experience for Pro and Enterprise teams and organisations, namely User & Team Management, Single Sign On, Roles & Groups, Permissions and much more to come. This role entails constant collaboration with other teams across Canva, giving you a lot of exposure to what other teams are working on and giving you the opportunity to connect the dots.

How do we scale our backend systems to enable Canva to support 10x the amount of users we have today? 

We decompose existing services, we build up new ones from scratch and care about software design. We constantly improve the way we get the most performance out of AWS resources, and along the way, we ship new features to improve the user experience for Enterprise and Education customers and their advanced organisational needs.


What you'll do

 
Collaborate as part of a backend focussed team of engineers to extend and scale out the backbone of Canva's Microservice landscape: the User Platform
 
Responsible for high performance systems to authenticate and manage users, avatars, groups and teams
 
Collaborate with the team to envision, design & plan, build and maintain new useful and reusable building blocks for the User Platform
 
Communicate with stakeholder teams to evaluate requirements, align timelines and optimise for value to the customers
 
Focus on improving the experience for customers with large teams in Enterprise and Education environments


What we're looking for

 
Working collaboratively with team mates and communicating effectively
 
Firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns
 
Strong background in designing, building and running high performance Java backend systems
 
Problem Solver mentality
 
Good writing and verbal communication skills
 
SQL experience

Nice to have

 
Experience with Authentication and Permission systems is a huge plus
 
DynamoDB experience is a plus



Working at Canva 

Our culture is unlike anywhere else and we design your #CanvaLife experience to empower you to do the best work of your life.  

Whether you’re in the office, working from home or choosing your own adventure, our benefits for permanent Canvanauts include: 

• Equity packages for you to truly be a part of the Canva journey. 
• We have a hybrid work model (in-office & from home), with our offices are always open to you balancing flexibility and connection
• Flexible leave so you can recharge, give back, support others or focus on your own professional development.
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and carers throughout their parenting and caring journey.
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance. This is for you to spend on whatever will support your wellbeing and development.. because you know what you need to Vibe and Thrive, better than anyone.
• Virtual and in-office wellness benefits including Canva University, Employee Assistant Programs and Fitness & Meditation Classes.
• Canva For Good program matching your not-for-profit donations, Force for Good leave (3 paid volunteering days) and a range of sustainability and ethical initiatives to get involved in.   

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion. Please note that interviews are conducted virtually. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.