Engineering Manager - Video Effects (China)

Company Description

About the Group/Team

We're the Video team within the Design Experience Supergroup, and we’re on a mission to empower every user to tell compelling visual stories through video. We build intuitive, powerful tools and rendering infrastructure that help users go from idea to impact—seamlessly. Together, we’re shaping the future of multimedia creation, and this role will be core to enabling innovation across Canva’s intelligent video editing experiences.

Job Description

About the Role/Specialty

This role will lead the Video Effects engineering team in China — building on-trend and cutting edge video effects for Canva that help our users creating compelling video content for their audience. You’ll work closely with Product, Design, AI/ML teams, and the video engineering teams in Australia, playing a central role in delivering low-latency, GPU-accelerated, and AI-enhanced video features to Canva’s global user base. You’ll accelerate our ability to ship high-performance AI-powered video tools globally by building a deeply technical and globally connected engineering team.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Lead a team of frontend, backend and machine learning engineers to build scalable video infrastructure and AI-powered services
• Drive technical roadmaps for video inference, transformation, and system performance
• Build bridges between AI/ML R&D and production systems, leveraging GPU/ML pipelines
• Collaborate across global teams to deliver innovative user-facing video editing tools
• Define and uphold engineering best practices and system design excellence
• Grow China-based engineering capability through coaching, hiring, and technical mentorship

Qualifications

What we're looking for

We're seeking a technical leader with a blend of engineering depth, product intuition, and people leadership. You'll bring:

• Strong technical leadership in graphics and ML pipelines, with experience scaling creative R&D teams
• Deep understanding of video processing architectures and performance optimization across GPU and ML workflows
• Proven ability to lead across geographies — delivering complex goals with autonomy and clarity
• A strong sense of ownership, self-direction, and passion for solving video editing and content creation challenges
• Experience in social media engineering, with a solid background in graphics and machine learning
• Excellent execution skills and communication — capable of maintaining velocity without compromising quality

Additional Information

What the candidate will learn and how will they develop at Canva

• Develop global technical leadership within a cross-functional AI/Video product ecosystem
• Build and scale systems used by millions of users around the world
• Gain exposure to cutting-edge LLM, video editing, and content creation R&D
• Shape Canva’s video technology strategy in one of its fastest-growing domains