Staff Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only)
Canva · San Francisco, United States · 11d ago
Company Description
Job Description
Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
Hello, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!
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.
About the role:
Video is the most resource-hungry thing Canva does. Every layer of it costs something: the browser, the phone in someone's hand, the native engine underneath, on-device ML, and the backend pipelines behind all of it. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Video Performance team, you'll own how fast all of that actually feels.
This is a full-stack performance role, anchored in the client. You'll decide what good performance means for Video, build the measurement that makes it visible, then lead the work that moves the numbers. That work runs across web and mobile surfaces, our cross-platform Native Video Engine, the Effect Platform, on-device ML and the backend services behind them. Deep expertise in one of those layers is a good place to start from. What matters most is being able to follow a slow user journey wherever it leads, and leaving behind tools that let other engineers do the same.
Most of our users are on mid-range and older devices. Keeping the experience fast for them, while the group keeps adding AI features and high-fidelity effects, is the genuinely interesting part of this job.
What you'd be doing:
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 a flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.
- Own performance across the whole video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, playback, effects and export, on web, iOS and Android. When a bottleneck turns out to live in someone else's layer, you follow it there.
- Define the performance metrics and service level objectives for Video, and make sure they track what people actually notice rather than what happens to be easy to measure.
- Build the measurement layer underneath that: telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting and regression detection, plus the profiling and benchmarking tooling, traces, device labs and automated performance suites, so any engineer in Video can diagnose a slow path without waiting for you.
- Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory and battery life. Sometimes that means a product or pipeline change. Sometimes it means critical-path work in the native engine, the shaders, or the ML-powered effect pipelines, wherever the data points.
- Work with the Native Video Engine, on-device ML and Editing teams to rework hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration and asynchronous processing, and get Video treating performance as a product feature rather than cleanup work.
You're probably a match if:
- You count every millisecond, byte and milliamp, and you've made real systems measurably faster. You can talk through the numbers.
- You've built at the client layer, on web, mobile or native, and you can follow a problem down into backend services or platform code when that's where the time is going. You find your bearings in an unfamiliar stack quickly.
- You've built performance tooling that other engineers came to rely on: profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites or telemetry pipelines. You're at home in tools like Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler and Chrome DevTools, happy to build your own when none of them fit, and you can define a metric that means something, spot a regression and prove an optimisation worked with data rather than intuition.
- You understand concurrency, memory behaviour and CPU and GPU cost models well enough to explain why something is slow, not only where.
- You have a working understanding of video pipelines: playback, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking and composition. Or the appetite to pick it up quickly.
- You prioritise by user impact, starting with the journeys people use most on the devices that struggle most, and you can influence engineering teams you don't own, across time zones, to get that work landed.
Nice to have:
Hands-on iOS or Android development focused on system-level performance (strongly preferred): UI responsiveness, startup, memory, battery and thermal behaviour, especially on low-end Android devices. Having built native apps, players or editors yourself counts for a lot here.
Proficiency in C++, or a comparable systems language such as Rust, optimising critical paths in a native engine, plus familiarity with graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU) and how rendering choices affect frame times.
On-device ML performance work, such as tuning inference latency with CoreML, TFLite or TensorRT, or WebAssembly performance tuning for heavy compute in the browser.
Contributions to open-source multimedia or graphics projects such as FFmpeg or Chromium.
About the team:
The Video Group is a global team of rendering engineers, ML engineers and product people, spread across Sydney, San Francisco and Beijing. In San Francisco you'd be joining a small team whose job is to keep the foundation solid while the rest of the group builds quickly on top of it.
We care about getting the details right, and we think an experience that feels effortless is worth a lot of unglamorous work underneath.
Where and how you can work:
Our flagship office is in Sydney, Australia, but we've made our way from down under to a hub in San Francisco, which is now home to our US operations. We offer flexibility in how and where you work. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.
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 range 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, because we want our success to be yours too
Health benefit plans to support you and your wellbeing
401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and carers
An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup and more
Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge, and support you personally
Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.
At Canva we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience and our overall assessment of what we observed and learnt in the hiring process. The target salary range for this position is USD $262,000 to $329,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.
Other stuff to know:
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills, merit and business needs, in compliance with applicable local laws.
We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva, so even if you don't feel like your skills quite match what's listed above, we still want to hear from you.
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.