Canva
Skills & Tech
Build real-time co-editing infrastructure used by 200M+ users as a Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Canva's Sydney HQ, shaping net-new primitives with a
This is a Senior Full-Stack Engineer position embedded within Canva's collaboration infrastructure group — the team responsible for the real-time co-editing engine that powers how millions of people create together. You'll be joining a high-trust squad of nine engineers building net-new primitives from the ground up, not maintaining legacy systems, with direct ownership over features that will ultimately serve more than 200 million users. If you've shipped at scale and want your fingerprints on infrastructure that genuinely matters, this is that role.
Design and build distributed systems that underpin real-time collaboration at massive scale — think conflict resolution, operational transforms, and low-latency sync across a global user base
Own features end-to-end: from technical scoping and architecture decisions through to deployment, monitoring, and observability — no handoffs, no silos
Write production-grade TypeScript across the full stack using React on the frontend and Node.js on the backend, backed by PostgreSQL and surfaced via GraphQL APIs
Architect and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS, with a sharp focus on resilience, fault tolerance, and performance under pressure
Instrument your own systems — define meaningful SLOs, build dashboards, own your alerts, and respond when things go wrong
Contribute meaningfully to technical direction within the squad: RFC reviews, design critiques, and raising the bar on engineering standards across the group
Use your protected 20% time to explore adjacent problem spaces, contribute to internal tooling, or go deep on a technical area you care about
Demonstrable experience shipping and operating full-stack systems at significant scale — you understand what breaks at 10M users and how to design for 200M
Strong command of React and TypeScript on the frontend, and Node.js on the backend — you're comfortable owning both sides without a context switch cost
Solid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, CAP trade-offs, event-driven architecture, and resilience patterns
Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, Lambda, SQS, RDS, or equivalents) and a mature approach to infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines
Experience with GraphQL API design — not just consuming them, but designing schemas that hold up over time as product requirements evolve
A proven instinct for observability: you instrument your code from day one and treat production visibility as a first-class engineering concern
Exposure to real-time systems, collaborative editing, or operational transformation algorithms is a genuine advantage — not required, but it'll give you a running start
$180,000 – $220,000 base salary (depending on experience), plus equity and a competitive total package benchmarked to the top of the Sydney market
Structured 20% time — protected, not aspirational — to invest in learning, internal projects, or technical exploration that interests you
A genuine deep IC track with no expectation or pressure to move into management; senior individual contributors are valued and promoted here
Hybrid setup with three days in a well-resourced Surry Hills HQ and the flexibility to work from home the rest of the week — no rigid 9-to-5 culture
Strong internal mobility culture with access to cross-squad transfers, internal talks, and a learning budget that actually gets used