Staff Software Engineer - API Platform (Remote across ANZ)

📋 Description

• • Own the technical destiny of Canva’s API ecosystem. You will craft the multi-year roadmap that determines how 100+ backend services discover, authenticate, and talk to one another at planet-scale, directly influencing the experience of 130 million monthly users.
• • Architect and code the next generation of service-to-service communication. From zero-downtime protocol upgrades to blue-green traffic shaping, you will design patterns that let teams ship 50+ times a day without breaking a single request.
• • Become the go-to authority on API architecture inside Canva. Through internal tech talks, design reviews, and living documentation you will raise the bar on naming conventions, versioning strategy, idempotency, and backward compatibility so every engineer can move faster with confidence.
• • Tackle gnarly distributed-systems problems hands-on. Whether it is shaving milliseconds off tail latency under 10× load spikes or eliminating thundering-herd retries, you will dive into the JVM, kernel, and network stack to prove that the proposed design actually works in production.
• • Future-proof our infrastructure for 1 billion monthly active users. You will experiment with new protocols (HTTP/3, QUIC, WebTransport), evaluate service-mesh sidecars, and prototype circuit-breaking algorithms that gracefully degrade instead of cascading failures.
• • Orchestrate large cross-team initiatives that touch dozens of code bases. You will break epics into realistic milestones, run weekly syncs, and publish crisp RFCs so that Platform, Product, and Security teams stay aligned while still maintaining velocity.
• • Mentor senior and mid-level engineers across four squads. Through pair programming, architecture clinics, and career-road-mapping you will turn high-potential developers into the next generation of staff-level leaders.
• • Champion a culture of operational excellence. You will define SLIs/SLOs for every new endpoint, automate canary analysis, and make post-mortems blameless yet actionable so that reliability becomes a shared habit, not a heroic effort.
• • Influence the external developer community. You will represent Canva at meet-ups and conferences, open-source key components of our API tooling, and gather feedback that feeds back into the internal roadmap.
• • Keep the human experience front-of-mind. Whether it is simplifying onboarding for a new graduate or advocating for inclusive language in API contracts, you will ensure that our technical brilliance translates into products that feel effortless and welcoming to every creator on Earth.