Senior Backend Engineer, Canva Core

About The Team

Our Canvas Core team builds and maintains the foundational platform that powers the visual thinking canvas. This includes the document model for Murals, the schema for storage in our database and the realtime message protocol that enables seamless remote collaboration.

Our primary focus is ensuring the Mural editor is reliable, high-performing, and easy to use.

We also provide a suite of APIs that other teams across the company use to build additional features such as collaboration & presentation tools, integrations, and AI-powered functionality. For these APIs, we prioritize simplicity and developer experience, making it as easy and fast as possible for others to build on top of our platform.

YOUR MISSION

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will ensure the Mural editor is reliable, high-performing, and intuitive, while designing and maintaining a suite of robust APIs that support real-time collaboration, presentations, integrations, and AI-powered features across the company.

You’ll lead projects end-to-end from design and planning through execution and release focusing on server APIs, data schemas, and storage infrastructure to guarantee scalability, performance, and extensibility.

Working closely with product and platform teams, you’ll enable a best-in-class user experience. You’ll also champion technical excellence by guiding complex system development, mentoring teammates, and helping shape our engineering practices and culture.

What You'll Do

• Lead research, design, and prototyping for backend features across the Canvas Core domain
• Build and maintain scalable, high-performance systems that support real-time collaboration in the Mural editor
• Drive projects from prototyping to production as a hands-on contributor and technical leader
• Design flexible, maintainable systems and ensure quality, reliability, and performance
• Use AI tools in your day-to-day workflow to enhance productivity and innovation
• Develop robust automated testing and documentation strategies
• Contribute to team growth by mentoring, leading technical discussions, and participating in code reviews
• Help evolve team processes and drive continuous improvement in our engineering practices

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years of experience building and shipping production-grade software in an agile team
• Strong full-stack development skills, with a focus on JavaScript/TypeScript and modern web frameworks (e.g., React, Node.js)
• Experience engineering real-time collaborative platforms, including Collaborative Document Editing or MMO / Virtual World development, including but not limited to understanding of conflict-free data replicated data types (CRDT), event sourcing and other kinds of distributed data structures
• Proven ability to quickly learn new technologies and navigate large codebases
• A strong interest in AI-driven development and a willingness to experiment with new approaches
• Experience leading technical projects and shipping customer-facing features in iterative cycles
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with an inclusive, team-first mindset
• Experience in fast-paced, high-growth environments or startups is a plus

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.