Engineering Manager (BE) - Media Platform

The Media Platform group builds services to empower Canva’s many users to design with every ingredient, on every device, whenever they design. The Core Media team owns the services that ingest process and serve up the millions of photos, graphics and fonts that are part of all the designs created on Canva every day.

Your day-to-day activities will consist of leading a team of high performing software engineers, setting goals and expectations for the team, driving a culture of high performance, whilst participating in engineering designs and problem solving.

What you will do:

• Lead a team that builds and maintains highly scaled backend services critical to most user interactions with Canva
• Oversee the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance solutions to support new features across Canva
• Collaborate closely with both group leadership and product & design specialties, to meet new product needs
• Set clear goals for the team; balancing product needs against the long-term health and cost of the owned services
• Work closely with many teams and groups across the company to balance requests against overall company priorities
• Communicate and collaborate with frontend, design, and other backend teams to integrate font and image-related services with the broader Canva product
• Coach engineers by providing regular, practical feedback and collaboratively helping them reach their personal growth goals
• Ensure code quality and maintainability through code reviews, testing, and adherence to best practices

Must-Have;

• Strong coaching skills and interpersonal skills, and can engage and motivate a team with diverse backgrounds and experiences
• Proven experience in leading and supporting engineering teams, fostering collaboration, providing feedback, and enabling high performance
• Experience in building highly scalable, secure and efficient backend services, ideally using Java
• Firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns
• Strong interpersonal skills to handle conflicts and difficult conversations
• Proficient in working with cloud platforms and services
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex issues
• Worked with large-scale datastore such as AWS DynamoDB, S3, or equivalent

Nice to have;

• Experience building large-scale distributed micro-services
• Technical background - having worked in a platform team as an IC or managed a platform-focused team previously
• Experience in image, font, audio or video processing would be an advantage