Senior Backend Engineer (Java) - Content Enrichment

Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Auckland. 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.

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:

• Generating, tagging, and storing metadata for all Canva content.
• Integrating our enrichment ML models with various Canva services to streamline content ingestion.
• Designing data pipelines to automate metadata backfills for the existing content library.
• Opportunities to contribute to ML model training and evaluation.
• Troubleshooting and resolving technical issues within the team’s domain.
• Managing stakeholders and identifying cross-team collaboration opportunities to drive new ideas and improvements that align with our goals.
• Investigating and providing guidance on interacting with our service and codebase in response to stakeholder requests.

You're probably a match if

• You have 5+ years of hands-on experience developing complex, distributed applications in Java.
• You are skilled in building and maintaining microservices and working with large monorepos.
• You design solutions with scalability, security, and maintainability in mind.
• You follow disciplined coding practices, actively participate in code reviews, and set best practice standards for your peers.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills and excel in team collaboration. A Canva engineer takes the time to fully understand the problem before diving into code.
• Experience with protocol buffers is a plus but not required.
• Knowledge of machine learning using python and concepts such as data wrangling, embeddings, model training, or prompt engineering is beneficial but not mandatory.
• Our services run on AWS—experience with AWS services like DynamoDB, SNS, and SQS is an advantage but not required.

About the team

Our team is responsible for two critical services within Canva, and here are some key metrics:

• 2.96 million public media items tagged per month
• 2.14 billion private media items tagged per month
• 112,000 videos tagged per month
• 6.27 million image texts extracted per month

We are a close-knit team of experienced engineers, including three senior machine learning engineers, two senior backend engineers (including yourself), one intermediate backend engineer (hiring), a senior backend architect, a product manager, and an engineering manager. We take a proactive approach to problem-solving, value knowledge sharing, and encourage open collaboration and idea exchange.

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.