Engineering Manager (BE) - Template Search Quality team (ANZ Remote)

📋 Description

• • Lead and grow a high-performing, distributed team of backend and machine-learning engineers who own the search architecture that powers Canva’s template discovery experience for 170 million monthly active users across 190 countries.
• • Evolve the end-to-end search stack—from ingestion pipelines and feature stores to ranking, retrieval, and experimentation platforms—ensuring millisecond-level latency, 99.9 % availability, and the ability to roll out new relevance models daily without downtime.
• • Drive measurable improvements in search quality by designing and deploying novel ranking signals, query understanding models, and A/B experimentation frameworks that lift click-through-rate, template-start-rate, and user satisfaction across homepage carousels, category pages, and keyword search.
• • Partner with product managers, designers, data scientists, and content curators to translate user research and behavioural insights into technical roadmaps that balance short-term wins with long-term architectural bets.
• • Set the technical direction for search ranking, experimentation infrastructure, and platform evolution—making pragmatic trade-offs between cutting-edge research and production stability while documenting decisions in architecture decision records (ADRs) that the broader engineering org can reference.
• • Champion an inclusive, feedback-rich engineering culture by instituting blameless post-mortems, mentoring engineers through structured growth plans, and creating forums where junior and senior voices are equally valued.
• • Own on-call health for the team’s services, defining SLOs, error budgets, and automated runbooks that reduce pager load and empower engineers to focus on innovation rather than firefighting.
• • Collaborate with the broader Discovery Group to align on shared data contracts, schema evolution strategies, and cross-team OKRs that ensure template search improvements amplify the impact of image, video, and brand asset search initiatives.
• • Influence company-level technical strategy by presenting quarterly reviews to the CTO and E-staff, advocating for investments in vector search, multilingual NLP, and responsible AI that keep Canva at the forefront of creative tooling.
• • Foster a culture of continuous learning by organising internal ML reading groups, sponsoring conference attendance, and maintaining an open-source presence that showcases Canva’s contributions to the search and recommendation community.
• • Translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives for non-technical stakeholders, ensuring product, marketing, and support teams understand how search improvements map to user delight and business growth.
• • Balance rapid experimentation with rigorous engineering discipline—shipping features behind feature flags, instrumenting every change with telemetry, and iterating based on statistically significant results from multivariate tests.
• • Contribute to Canva’s global expansion by localising ranking models for right-to-left languages, cultural aesthetics, and regional compliance requirements, ensuring every creator feels seen and empowered.
• • Celebrate wins loudly and learn from failures openly, embedding a sense of curiosity, craftsmanship, and joy that makes Canva not just a workplace but a community where people do the best work of their lives.