Staff Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only) at Canva in San Francisco, CA

Job description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hello, 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. About the role: Video is the most resource-hungry thing Canva does. Every layer of it costs something: the browser, the phone in someone's hand, the native engine underneath, on-device ML, and the backend pipelines behind all of it. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Video Performance team, you'll own how fast all of that actually feels. This is a full-stack performance role, anchored in the client. You'll decide what good performance means for Video, build the measurement that makes it visible, then lead the work that moves the numbers. That work runs across web and mobile surfaces, our cross-platform Native Video Engine, the Effect Platform, on-device ML and the backend services behind them. Deep expertise in one of those layers is a good place to start from. What matters most is being able to follow a slow user journey wherever it leads, and leaving behind tools that let other engineers do the same. Most of our users are on mid-range and older devices. Keeping the experience fast for them, while the group keeps adding AI features and high-fidelity effects, is the genuinely interesting part of this job. What you'd be doing: 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 a flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve. Own performance across the whole video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, playback, effects and export, on web, iOS and Android. When a bottleneck turns out to live in someone else's layer, you follow it there. Define the performance metrics and service level objectives for Video, and make sure they track what people actually notice rather than what happens to be easy to measure. Build the measurement layer underneath that: telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting and regression detection, plus the profiling and benchmarking tooling, traces, device labs and automated performance suites, so any engineer in Video can diagnose a slow path without waiting for you. Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory and battery life. Sometimes that means a product or pipeline change. Sometimes it means critical-path work in the native engine, the shaders, or the ML-powered effect pipelines, wherever the data points. Work with the Native Video Engine, on-device ML and Editing teams to rework hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration and asynchronous processing, and get Video treating performance as a product feature rather than cleanup work. You're probably a match if: You count every millisecond, byte and milliamp, and you've made real systems measurably faster. You can talk through the numbers. You've built at the client layer, on web, mobile or native, and you can follow a problem down into backend services or platform code when that's where the time is going. You find your bearings in an unfamiliar stack quickly. You've built performance tooling that other engineers came to rely on: profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites or telemetry pipelines. You're at home in tools like Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler and Chrome DevTools, happy to build your own when none of them fit, and you can define a metric that means something, spot a regression and prove an optimisation worked with data rather than intuition. You understand concurrency, memory behaviour and CPU and GPU cost models well enough to explain why something is slow, not only where. You have a working understanding of video pipelines: playback, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking and composition. O