Company Description

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, Adelaide and Auckland. But you have 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.

Job Description

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.

This role will see you:

• Leading a high-performing backend engineering team in building the indexing, retrieval, and observability infrastructure that powers Canva’s search.

• Coaching engineers and fostering a culture of ownership, experimentation, and growth.

• Driving the technical roadmap to evolve our search platform toward a modular, low-latency architecture that scales to billions of documents.

• Partnering with Product Managers and AI/ML teams to support emerging needs like Vector Search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and multi-modal discovery.

• Elevating developer velocity through clean APIs, documentation, and self-service tooling.

• Championing system reliability and sustainable on-call practices for critical services.

You're probably a match if

• You’ve led backend teams building and scaling distributed systems — ideally in a search or data-intensive environment.

• You think like a platform builder — enabling others through high-quality infrastructure, clean interfaces, and great documentation.

• You’re energised by ambiguity and scale, and thrive when translating vision into execution.

• You understand technical trade-offs and are confident navigating discussions between performance, latency, and complexity.

• You’re known for being a people-first leader — coaching engineers and building high-trust, high-impact teams.

• You lead with empathy and believe great engineering is a human endeavour.

About the team

The Discovery Platform team sits within the Discovery Group. We build and maintain the core indexing and querying frameworks that all of Canva’s search systems rely on. From internal observability tooling to scalable, modular frameworks, we enable product teams to ship search experiences fast, with confidence. Every search on Canva starts here.

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.