Front-end Engineer, Performance Platform

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:

• Providing other teams with the tools and ability to accurately measure relevant performance metrics, which reflect users’ experience.
• Building and maintaining tools we use to test performance in our builds, tools to give feedback on performance regressions in pull requests, tools to measure real user performance metrics, and tools supporting engineers to accurately instrument performance metrics.
• Harnessing the performance data we collect from real users or from synthetic monitoring applications to find areas where we can improve performance for the user experience.
• Collaborating with the team and other engineers outside the team to find issues in the whole product and communicate clear action items. Empowering other engineers is one of our team’s core values.
• Advocating for and supporting company-wide initiatives for Open Telemetry and tracking real users performance metrics.
• Working with performance profiling and debugging tools in your web browser of choice. These are tools such as Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and others.

You’re probably a match if:

• Passion for performance debugging and benchmarking.
• Knowledge on common performance issues: what bottlenecks the browser main thread, network requests, and anything related to rendering pixels to the screen in a browser.
• Knowledge of JavaScript and web technologies (HTML/CSS)
• Experience developing rich applications with HTML/CSS/JS
• Ability to write high-performance, reusable code for UI components, including appropriate testing
• Experimenting with technologies and architectural patterns that will improve the way we develop features to make fast performance a default.
• Experience with taking part in culture-shift initiatives across the company
• Ability to work with stakeholders across the company and organization levels and manage up
• Ability to be empathetic towards users having slow/janky experiences using Canva as well as towards product engineers using our tools
• Minimum 3 years experience
• Computer science fundamentals

Bonus experience:

• Experience with Real User Monitoring and Open Telemetry
• Experience using data monitoring and business intelligence platforms like Looker, Datadog or Mode.
• Experience with automated browser E2E testing
• Experience with developing CI & Build tools
• Experience with full-stack web development or backend for frontend work, like Android development.
• Experience with developer advocacy and evangelising, like giving technical presentations, talks, and speaking at conferences.

The Role and the Team:

Performance is important for us in Canva. We want to be the fastest graphical design tool in the world. The Performance team is set to achieve this mission. We are building a performance culture in Canva and to do that, we are looking for engineers with an interest in performance, how to debug and measure, and changing the way we work to allow fast performance by default.

We’d love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these:

You are a fan of solving performance issues and know how to debug and propose solutions ranging from a practical quick fix to a standardised change to roll out across the company. You understand the reasons behind why every performance metrics are different and how it relates to the user experience. You know how to measure performance from synthetic measurements to collecting real user performance metrics. You have experience in creating a system for automated performance testing and know how to effectively fit this into a developer’s workflow.

You will be exploring new ways to improve our engineering practices. Your work would be getting more useful insights to show how performance issues affect us, finding engineering best practices and communicating how to use it across the company, building tools to make sure the code we write are up to our performance standards, and being the performance evangelist in the company alongside the rest of the team.

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 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.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

Apply now >