Engineering Manager (BE) - API Platform

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:

• Design & build backend components that help Canva scale gracefully.
• Operate & evolve the key services that make up Canva’s service mesh.
• Advocate for the team in roadmap and planning forums, ensuring our voice is heard.
• Uplift reliability, speed, and security through team-wide initiatives and post-incident learnings.
• Share knowledge by writing clear docs, guidelines, and design briefs.
• Collaborate with engineers and product partners to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Mentor & grow a team of talented engineers, fostering a safe, inclusive, high-performance culture.

You're probably a match if you:

• Have deep, practical experience in Java, Python, C++, or other backend languages.
• Feel at home with CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, and security best practices.
• Know AWS inside-out and can guide others through cloud trade-offs.
• Champion automation and AI—both in your own workflow and across the team.
• Bring solid CS fundamentals and a keen eye for architecture & design patterns.
• Have led engineers: setting clear goals, giving feedback, and hiring exceptional talent.
• Communicate with clarity—whether you’re writing a design doc or speaking to execs.

About the Group

We sit inside Canva’s Product Platform Group and own the building blocks that turn code into reliable microservices. Our mission: keep Canva backends safe, observable, and easy to reason about so product teams can ship magic at speed.

About the Role

As an Engineering Manager in API Platform you will play a crucial role in developing capabilities that power Canvas hundreds of microservices. Your expertise will contribute to the design and implementation of components that get used by hundreds of engineers to process billions of messages for our millions of users. All the while we must uphold our commitment to reliability, availability and security. The services you help build will ensure our users have a great experience every time they come to design on Canva.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

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.