What you’d be doing in this role
Backend roles at Canva can vary significantly depending on the team—each focused on solving meaningful problems at scale. You might help build scalable APIs powering millions of user interactions, improve system performance and reliability at scale, or contribute to shared services and internal tools. With multiple teams hiring backend engineers, we’d love to learn what excites you most and find the right fit for your passions and strengths.
You’ll work closely with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to deliver end-to-end experiences that have real user impact. Whether you're designing new systems or maintaining critical infrastructure, your work will play a key role in Canva’s mission to empower the world to design.
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 the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.
As a general guide, here’s what a backend engineer at this level typically focuses on day to day:
- Designing and implementing backend features within an existing service architecture
- Building and maintaining services that power user experiences and internal systems at scale
- Writing clean, well-tested, and maintainable code with guidance from more experienced engineers
- Collaborating with engineers, product managers, and designers to understand problems and ship high-quality solutions
- Participating in code reviews, pair programming, and technical discussions as part of a supportive team
- Contributing to system health by writing tests, improving observability, and fixing bugs or performance issues
- Continuously learning through mentorship, feedback, and exposure to different parts of Canva’s engineering stack
You're probably a match if
- You are experienced in building backend systems using Java in a production environment
- You have strong Java fundamentals and can confidently write production-grade code, applying backend concepts like multithreading, service design, and performance optimisation in real-world systems.
- You understand the basics of distributed systems and are comfortable developing and consuming RESTful APIs
- You can work through problems from design to deployment with support from your team
- You apply sound engineering practices—such as testing, monitoring, and documentation—and write clean, maintainable code
- You enjoy collaborating with engineers, designers, and product managers to build end-to-end solutions
- You take initiative, seek feedback, and are always looking to improve your craft and contribute to your team’s success
- You have hands-on experience using AI in coding/programming to drive greater impact
