Senior Backend Engineer (Java) - Content Management

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 a 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

This year the Content Management & Distribution group is on a mission to inspire everyone to visually communicate and stay organised. Our group is doubling down on several critical initiatives to help us achieve our company-level strategy of driving teams and collaboration in Canva. Our goals focus on helping teams that use Canva to store, navigate, organise and find their designs as effectively as possible. This means that we build rich features into the Canva home page and for use in-context within the editor. We work closely with teams across the company, including search, education, growth, and platform. The features that our team build are core to the every day use of our over 100 million users and so performance and reliability are at the forefront of everything we do.

At the moment, you will be focused on:

• Building out brand new services for supporting the storage of all asset types in Canva and integrating with existing services across Folders, Media, Video, Audio, Document and Search.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to understand requirements and designing scalable solutions.
• Help the team to build and deliver great user experiences
• Leading continuous improvement efforts within your team.
• Troubleshooting and resolving technical issues related to the team’s domain as and when they arise, and being part of team’s rostered on call rotation.
• Providing on-call support for critical Canva services.
• Staying updated on industry trends and best practices to innovate and improve the domain owned by the team.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Play a leading role in delivering the services powering the AI Powered DAM, collaborating across T&E, Media Platform, and Product Platform.
• Propose innovative approaches and solutions to future-proof Canva's product decision platforms and deliver on business outcomes.
• Engage with others to shape the improvements through writing design documents and running design meetings.
• Advocate for best practices that enhance service performance, resilience, and adaptability.
• Design and implement the most intricate aspects of the system, showcasing your aptitude for tackling complex technical challenges effectively.
• Guide the implementation of major projects, planning task breakdown and keeping engineers in sync using excellent verbal and written communication skills, including architectural diagrams.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to other engineers, assisting them in their professional development and helping them navigate technical challenges.
• Have a widespread impact across the organization by facilitating and orchestrating cross-team initiatives that set a higher standard for reliability, velocity, and security.

What we're looking for

• Extensive experience developing distributed web applications, with a deep understanding of Java.
• A track record of successfully planning and executing complex architectural changes, with a strong focus on creative problem-solving rather than reliance on specific frameworks or libraries.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to foster a positive working environment across stakeholders and engineers.
• Proven experience mentoring and guiding engineering teams, unblocking technical challenges, and serving as a role model.
• Mastery of computer science and engineering fundamentals such as concurrency, data structures, and distributed systems, along with a strong grasp of resiliency techniques like load balancing, throttling, back pressure, and circuit breaking.
• Hands-on experience working in large distributed cloud environments (AWS preferred) and familiarity with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Bonus: Experience with large-scale distributed asset management systems.

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.

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.