Senior Backend Engineer

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 choice in where and how you work. That means if you want to do your thing in the office (if you're near one), at home or a bit of both, it's up to you. 

What you'd be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Building and evolving backend systems that power feature flagging and progressive delivery at Canva.
• Designing safe rollout patterns, targeting logic, and observability integrations to ensure confidence in launches.
• Collaborating with platform and product teams to embed safety and control into their development workflows.
• Maintaining and improving the performance, reliability, and scalability of the flag infrastructure.
• Participating in code reviews, technical design discussions, and cross-team architecture planning.
• Sharing knowledge and elevating engineering craft through mentorship and best practices.

You're probably a match if you are:

• An experienced backend engineer, ideally with a background in building platforms, internal tools, or safety-critical systems.
• Skilled in designing and scaling APIs, distributed systems, or configuration-based infrastructure.
• Comfortable managing infrastructure at scale using container orchestration platforms.
• Familiar with (or keen to learn) concepts like progressive delivery, flag targeting, and rollout metrics.
• Thriving in cross-functional teams and enjoy collaborating with product, data, and infra partners.
• Committed to writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, while advocating for engineering excellence.
• Thoughtful about safety, observability, and the long-term health of systems.
• Motivated by solving complex technical challenges and influencing the product roadmap.
• Excited about building tools that empower others to ship better, faster, and safer.

About the team

You'll join the Feature Control team within the Product Insights Enablement (PIE) group. We empower teams across Canva to ship new features safely and progressively — with robust flagging, rollout, and control systems. Our infrastructure supports everything from small A/B tests to global rollouts, including high-stakes launches like major redesigns and ML models. We partner closely with engineering, data, and product to enable safe, data-informed delivery at scale.

About the Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll be a key technical contributor to the evolution of Canva's rollout platform. You'll design and build systems that help product teams control, observe, and measure how features are released. This includes infrastructure for flag targeting, safety checks, integrations with observability tools, and support for complex rollout strategies. Your work will directly shape how every team at Canva ships product — and how we reduce risk while moving fast.

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 stack 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 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.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.