Engineering Manager (Frontend) - Design System Experience

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, gday, 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. That means if you want to do your thing in the office (if you're near one), at home or a bit of both, it's up to you. 

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:

• Leading a cross-functional team to make the design system more intuitive, empowering, and efficient for everyone who builds with it
• Defining the goals and technical roadmap for the team, informed by consumer needs and in collaboration with the team and stakeholders
• Driving thoughtful exploration of strategic opportunities — including ways the design system can support new AI-powered workflows
• Ensuring the team is happy and healthy, as well as high-functioning and impactful, to best deliver on goals
• Conducting regular 1:1s to provide technical direction, mentorship, actionable feedback
• Setting priorities for and supporting coachees with execution
• Developing growth plans for engineers on the team
• Refining team processes to ensure effective and sustainable delivery
• Reviewing PRs and design docs from the team, and may also contribute code towards delivery

You're probably a match if have/are

• People leadership experience providing constructive feedback to others and supporting other engineers to reach their goals
• Working with a design system or maintaining components other teams depend on, but an interest in the problem space goes a long way
• Curiosity about how AI can improve developer and design workflows
• A strong product mindset — ability to identify user problems and champion pragmatic, high-impact solutions
• Experience developing rich web applications, ideally Typescript/React/MobX
• Practical knowledge of data structures and algorithms

Nice to have:

• Experience successfully advocating for goals and driving significant technical changes through leading others and as an individual contributor
• Experience in stakeholder communication or internal advocacy
• Experience writing accessible code and reading detailed specifications (WCAG 2.2 AA)
• Cross-browser and cross-device development

About the Team

A design system is a collection of design guidelines, reusable user interface components, and related resources and tools. Canva has three design system teams working on our shared mission is to build a world-class design system that empowers Canva staff to craft and excellent experiences at scale.

The Design System Experience team focuses on making the design system easy to learn, discover, and use. We drive self-serve documentation, tooling, and usability-focussed improvements to the design system. A key opportunity ahead is evolving Easel to support not just human contributors, but also emerging AI-powered workflows to enable faster prototyping, automated interface generation, and smarter design and UI development tooling.

About the Role

Through a combination of mentoring, technical leadership and coaching, you would be accountable for helping the Design System Experience team of 6+ engineers achieve their goals, maintaining an environment where the team members can do their best work, and growing and developing a skilled engineering team.

At Canva, we believe that a happy and thriving team is a necessary precondition for impactful and productive delivery and an empathetic growth-oriented leader is critical to that.

Ideally you’ll have experience either with working with design systems or leading a team, but first and foremost we’re looking for someone passionate and driven, for whom this role is an exciting growth opportunity. If you're excited about engineering leadership, platform strategy, and empowering users, we’d love to hear from you.

What's in it for you?

• You'll learn how to build a healthy high-performing team at a fast-moving company in a rapidly-changing technology and product space
• You'll learn how to scale a design system used by 600+ frontend engineers and 200+ designers in a complex product with a wide range of concerns including accessibility, cross-platform, and cross-device considerations.
• You'll learn how to navigate our Canva organisational structure - an ever-growing startup where you will get a chance to understand different team and engineers motivations and experiences, and teach them how to improve frontend best practices with the tools we build.

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 stack 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.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.