Software Engineer - Java, Product & Features

At Canva, our mission is to democratize design and empower creativity and visual expression for every person, on every platform. Since launch in April 2013, our user base has grown exponentially, amassing over 15 million monthly active users in over 190 different countries, making us one of the world's fastest-growing technology companies. As of today, we've achieved profitability, and the company is valued over USD$3.2 Billion, which comfortably prepares us for the next phase of growth and development.

Software engineering is the core of who we are at Canva. The Canva code base was built to scale from day one. This has allowed for a unique environment where engineers spend most of their time optimizing performance and releasing new features rather than fixing legacy code. With an adherence to fundamentals and first principles, the team strives to use the most appropriate tools for the tasks at hand, aiming to strike that carefully measured balance between getting things done and long-term maintainability of the code base and supporting infrastructure.

We promote a warm and collaborative work environment where engineers set big goals and are given the tools and support to achieve them. We also invite our engineers to contribute to the direction their peers are taking with proactive pair ups for peer-reviewing of code as well as regular engineering forums for opinions and ideas to be heard. These practices ensure that knowledge is shared and releases are quick and efficient.

Finally - you're probably curious about our technology stack. At a high level, Canva's backend is powered by a set of services (some micro, some not-so-micro) built primarily in Java, hosted on Linux, sitting on AWS. We also sprinkle in some powerful open-source libraries and tools (have a look at finagle), as well as bespoke components to power some of the magic.

Role Responsibilities

• Your day to day activities will consist of solution design and hands-on software development – working closely with leads, designers, and product managers to deliver features and functionality to our customers all over the world
• Once you’ve settled in and have a comfortable grasp of the product, environment, and processes, you’ll be given more responsibility and start leveraging your previous experience — bringing new ideas to the table concerning everything from feature development, process improvement, and product suggestions
• Taking charge of your career development by seizing opportunities to work across different teams, technologies, and roles
• Developing and iterating on technical proposals – outlining how solutions will be structured and developed
• Developing solutions you’ve designed from the ground up through to deployment into production
• Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks within the application and broader infrastructure
• Being responsible for the reliability of your solution, including monitoring and responding to incidents. We care about reliability greatly as your code is going to be used by millions of people
• Participating in design meetings, hiring interviews, and code reviews
• Performance debugging, benchmarking, and building awesome things in general

Required Experience & Skills

• Commercial experience developing complex web applications
• Most of our code is in Java, but we're pragmatic - we'll use whatever makes the most sense to complete a task (previous experience with other languages is great!)
• Firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns. You’d be surprised how often these things come up here at Canva!
• That you’re happy to roll the sleeves up and dive into java.util.concurrent from time to time 🙂
• Working collaboratively with team members and communicating effectively

Benefits

• Competitive salary, plus equity options
• Flexible working hours, we mean it when we say we value work-life balance
• In-house chefs that cook delicious breakfast and lunch for us each day
• Free Gym and Yoga
• Generous parental (including secondary) leave policy
• Pet-friendly offices
• We offer a full relocation package (including visa)