Job Overview
Location
Sydney
Job Type
Full-time
Category
Engineering Manager
Date Posted
January 9, 2026
Full Job Description
đź“‹ Description
- • Lead a high-performing backend engineering team that owns the beating heart of Canva’s search experience. You will guide 8-12 engineers who design, build, and operate the indexing, retrieval, and observability infrastructure that powers every search query across Canva’s 170-million-plus monthly active users.
- • Shape the technical roadmap for a platform that indexes billions of creative assets (templates, images, videos, audio, text) and returns sub-second, highly-relevant results. Your decisions will directly influence how quickly millions of designers, marketers, and students find the perfect asset to bring their ideas to life.
- • Coach and mentor engineers across all levels—from new graduates to principal engineers—fostering a culture of psychological safety, experimentation, and continuous learning. You will run weekly 1:1s, craft growth plans, and create space for deep technical exploration while ensuring predictable delivery against ambitious OKRs.
- • Drive architectural evolution toward a modular, low-latency, cloud-native search platform. This includes migrating monolithic services to micro-services, introducing vector search capabilities, and enabling Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows that marry large language models with Canva’s proprietary data.
- • Collaborate daily with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and AI/ML researchers to translate fuzzy product ideas into concrete technical deliverables. You will balance cutting-edge research with pragmatic engineering trade-offs, ensuring every experiment can be shipped safely and scaled globally.
- • Elevate developer velocity across the entire Discovery Group by defining golden-path APIs, writing crisp technical design docs, and building self-service tooling that lets product teams spin up new search experiences in days—not months.
- • Champion reliability and sustainable on-call practices for tier-0 services. You will institute SLIs/SLOs, automate runbooks, and lead blameless post-mortems that turn incidents into learning opportunities rather than stress points.
- • Represent the Discovery Platform team in quarterly planning, head-count discussions, and cross-group architecture reviews. You will articulate the business impact of technical investments, secure funding for experimental bets, and evangelize best practices across Canva’s 3,000-plus global workforce.
- • Stay hands-on when needed: reviewing code, pairing on gnarly performance issues, or diving into data pipelines to debug why a specific query returns irrelevant cat stickers instead of professional business cards. Your credibility stems from deep technical empathy, not just managerial oversight.
- • Foster an inclusive, remote-first culture across Australia and New Zealand time zones. You will orchestrate virtual design sprints, asynchronous decision-making rituals, and occasional in-person off-sites that keep the team connected and inspired.
- • Contribute to Canva’s open-source footprint by publishing libraries, blog posts, and conference talks that share how we solve search at planetary scale. Your thought leadership will attract top-tier talent and strengthen Canva’s reputation as an engineering powerhouse.
🎯 Requirements
- • 5+ years leading backend or data engineering teams in high-growth, product-centric environments; hands-on experience with distributed systems at petabyte scale.
- • Proven track record designing and operating search or recommendation platforms (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, or custom solutions) serving >100 M requests/day.
- • Deep fluency in Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python; comfort with cloud-native architectures on AWS/GCP, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK).
- • Demonstrated ability to balance technical debt, feature velocity, and reliability—making defensible trade-offs under ambiguity and tight deadlines.
- • People-first leadership style: experience mentoring senior engineers, running inclusive hiring processes, and cultivating psychological safety across remote teams.
🏖️ Benefits
- • Competitive equity packages—share in Canva’s continued global growth and see your impact translate into tangible financial upside.
- • Inclusive parental leave policy (18 weeks paid primary carer, 8 weeks secondary) plus superannuation contributions, fully supporting all parents and carers regardless of gender or family structure.
- • Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance (AUD 2,000) for wellness, home-office setup, ergonomic gear, or co-working passes—use it your way to stay energized and connected.
- • Flexible leave options: unlimited paid volunteer days to support causes you care about, plus additional personal leave for rest, recharge, or life’s big moments.
Skills & Technologies
Onsite
About Canva Pty Ltd
Canva is an Australian graphic-design platform providing a web-based and mobile application for creating social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. It offers templates, stock photography, illustrations, fonts and drag-and-drop functionality through a freemium subscription model serving consumers, small businesses, educators and large enterprises. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Sydney, the company operates globally with offices in Manila, Beijing and Austin, and supports over 100 languages.
