About this role.
Mural is seeking a senior engineer for its Canvas Core platform, which underpins the collaborative visual editor, document model, rendering, asset management, and internal developer APIs. The role focuses on scalable TypeScript/JavaScript engineering for real-time, concurrent shared-document experiences with strong performance and reliability requirements. The successful candidate will own features end to end, collaborate closely with Product and Design, and raise engineering standards through reviews, mentoring, and technical design work. Experience with distributed synchronization, low-latency interaction, rich object models, and performance optimization is particularly relevant. The position also involves using and integrating AI-assisted and AI-enabled product capabilities where they intersect with the canvas platform.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader UK market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would first define the document model, consistency requirements, expected conflict patterns, and offline or reconnect behavior. I would then evaluate an approach such as operational transformation or CRDTs, define event ordering and idempotency rules, and build observability around latency, conflicts, retries, and reconciliation. The design should prioritize predictable user behavior while allowing the system to scale safely.
I would begin with profiling to identify whether the bottleneck was rendering, event processing, memory pressure, network activity, or expensive main-thread computation. Typical remedies include batching updates, memoizing derived state, virtualizing visible content, moving work to workers, and simplifying hot-path data structures. I would validate the improvement against measurable interaction latency and regression tests.
I start by understanding consumer workflows and designing a small, coherent interface with clear ownership and stable abstractions. I define schemas, validation, errors, versioning, authorization, documentation, and migration paths early. I also use examples, contract tests, and feedback from early adopters to ensure the API is both safe and practical.
I would clarify the user outcome, delivery constraints, and likely future reuse before proposing options. Where possible, I would deliver a thin vertical slice built on an extensible boundary rather than create a one-off path that becomes permanent debt. I would make trade-offs explicit, document any intentional debt, and schedule follow-up work when the feature proves its value.
I use AI tools to accelerate exploration, implementation drafts, test generation, documentation, and analysis, while retaining engineering ownership of all decisions. I verify generated code through review, tests, security checks, and performance evaluation, especially around concurrency and data handling. I also avoid exposing sensitive information to tools that are not approved for that purpose.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Canvas Core team builds and maintains the foundational platform that powers Mural’s visual thinking experience. This includes the infinite canvas, key editor components, document editing behaviors, asset management, real-time collaboration, and the systems that enable fast, reliable, and intuitive interaction on the canvas.
We’re also responsible for the Mural UI, the real-time message protocol that enables seamless remote collaboration, and the developer-friendly APIs that internal teams use to build features like diagramming, workshops, presentations, integrations, and AI-enabled product capabilities.
Our mission is to ensure the Mural editor is fast, reliable, intuitive, and easy to build on.
We prioritize performance, simplicity, developer experience, and platform quality, enabling teams across the company to ship quickly and safely on top of Canvas Core.
YOUR MISSION
As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help design, build, and improve the Canvas platform so that the Mural editor remains reliable, high-performing, and intuitive for our users.
You’ll work on the systems that power real-time collaboration, shared document editing, spatial interactions, rendering and interaction performance, asset management, developer APIs, and AI-enabled product capabilities across the Mural editor.
Your role will be to reduce platform complexity, improve the quality and speed of Canvas development, and help teams ship high-quality editor experiences quickly and safely. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to turn ambiguous product and platform problems into clear, maintainable technical solutions.
Senior Engineers at Mural lead by example through strong technical execution, thoughtful design, high-quality implementation, and collaborative problem-solving. They help raise the bar for their team through design discussions, code reviews, mentoring, documentation, and pragmatic improvements to engineering practices.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
Own and deliver new Canvas platform capabilities and improvements from problem definition through implementation, release, measurement, and iteration
Partner with Product and Design to shape high-quality user experiences, balancing pragmatic technical delivery with long-term platform needs
Design and build maintainable Canvas platform systems, with accountability for quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience
Contribute to developer-friendly APIs, service boundaries, and platform contracts that internal teams can build on quickly and safely
Use AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows as part of your engineering practice to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure work effectively
Strengthen the team through technical design reviews, demos, code reviews, mentoring, and improvements to engineering practices
Build and evolve canvas systems with rich document and object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, and selection mechanics
Work on large-scale concurrent and real-time collaboration systems that keep shared documents synchronized across users, contributing to design decisions around event ordering, latency, conflict handling, and failure-mode management
Help design, build, and integrate AI-enabled product capabilities where they intersect with the canvas, document model, real-time collaboration systems, or developer platform
Improve performance through profiling, bottleneck analysis, architectural simplification, targeted optimization, and moving expensive work out of critical interaction paths so systems remain responsive as document complexity and user activity scale
WHAT YOU’LL BRING
Fluency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript, with familiarity in React, Node.js, or comparable modern frameworks
6+ years building and shipping large-scale production software as part of an agile engineering team
Strong engineering judgment, with experience designing and delivering scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and developer-facing abstractions that balance simplicity, developer experience, and long-term maintainability
Experience designing clean API contracts and service boundaries, including thoughtful data models, versioning, validation, error handling, documentation, and long-term maintainability
Experience building distributed, concurrent, collaborative, or low-latency systems, such as collaboration tools, MMO games, shared-state systems, messaging protocols, or other low-latency user experiences, with familiarity across synchronization, consistency, event ordering, latency, failure modes, and performance trade-offs
Exposure to complex systems with rich object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, selection mechanics, and performance-sensitive user interactions is a strong plus
Interest in AI-enabled product capabilities, or hands-on experience building or integrating them in production, such as intelligent editing, automation, recommendations, semantic document understanding, or collaboration features powered by AI
Performance optimization experience, including profiling, bottleneck analysis, memory and CPU efficiency, latency reduction, and responsiveness as document complexity and user activity scale
Familiarity with parallel processing, off-main-thread architectures, rendering pipelines, background computation, or other multithreaded systems is a plus
Practical experience using AI-assisted tools to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure engineering work
Communication and collaboration skills, with a low-ego approach to working with Product, Design, and Engineering, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions, collaborate across teams, and help improve team engineering practices
Comfort operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments or scale-ups is a plus
Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Equal Opportunity
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
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