Staff Software Engineer - Experiments Platform (AU remote)

Location: Sydney, au, Remote

Company Description

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney, with a second campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, & Adelaide. You have flexibility in how and where you work — whether thats from one of our spaces, from home, or a mix of both. This role is remote-friendly within Australia, so you can choose the setup that empowers you and your team to do your best work.

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, gday, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and youre probably keen to find out whats on offer, so well get straight to the point. 

What youd be doing in this role:

Canva is making experimentation a much bigger part of how we build and ship product.

At our scale, shipping changes and watching what happens isnt enough. Teams need to know whether a change actually improved the product and catch changes that unexpectedly hurt important guardrails such as retention or application performance.

This Staff Software Engineer will provide senior technical leadership across the backend systems behind Canvas experimentation programme.

Youll help evolve the platform teams use to set up experiments, target users, expose variants and measure outcomes in the safest and most intuitive way possible. Were moving towards a platform that does more than report results. It should reinforce good experimentation practices, surface signals faster and alert early when things go wrong.

With the advent of AI, we’re also looking at how we can automate more of the analysis process to help our teams learn faster and iterate.

Youll take ownership of significant technical problems, work with senior leaders across Canva and help shape where the platform should go next by working with the teams building the platform.

You’re probably a match:

Wed love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You dont need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, were invested in helping you grow.

Experience:

• Backend platform engineering: Youve built backend systems or platforms that other engineers depend on, and understand what changes when your software becomes part of somebody elses critical path.

• Experimentation exposure at scale: Youve built, operated or worked deeply with experimentation, A/B testing, feature-management or progressive-rollout systems in a large engineering environment.

• Technical leadership: Youve taken ambiguous engineering problems, formed a technical direction and helped other engineers move towards an outcome.

• Driving adoption: Youve built internal platforms or capabilities and understand that the technology only succeeds when other teams trust and use it.

Technical knowledge:

• Backend and distributed systems: Strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience designing reliable backend systems and reasoning about scalability, availability, consistency and failure modes.

• Data systems: Enough familiarity with data engineering, analytics engineering or large-scale data processing to understand how experimentation data is generated, moved and consumed.

• Experimentation concepts: Familiarity with experiment assignment, targeting, variants, feature flags, metrics, guardrails and progressive rollout.

• Language depth: Java is our primary language and would be useful, but it isnt a hard requirement. At Staff level, were more interested in strong engineering fundamentals and your ability to transfer them between languages.

Nice to haves:

• Youve built this before: Direct experience designing or building experimentation, A/B testing, feature-management or rollout infrastructure — either inside a large technology company or for a platform vendor.

• Data crossover: A background spanning software engineering and data science, data engineering or analytics engineering.

• Feature flags: Experience building feature flagging, user targeting, progressive rollout or automated guardrail systems.

• Statistical intuition: You dont need to be a data scientist, but being comfortable enough with experimentation and statistics to work closely with one will be valuable.

About the Group & Team:

This role sits within Rollout Insights, the subgroup responsible for experimentation at Canva.

The team builds shared experimentation capabilities used across the company.

Engineers use the platform to configure and launch experiments. Data scientists use the resulting data to understand impact. Product teams use those insights to decide what should roll out, change or stop.

The team already brings together software engineering and senior data science expertise, which matters because the hardest problems sit across both disciplines.

Youll also collaborate broadly across Canvas engineering and data science organisations, including with senior technical leaders who depend on the platform.

Experimentation is now a major company priority, so demand for the teams capabilities is growing quickly. Theres already a platform to build from, with plenty of important technical work still ahead.

Additional Information

Whats in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but youll 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.

Heres a taste of whats 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 see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. Were evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience — youll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side.

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 dont feel like your skills quite match whats listed above — we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.