Senior Backend Engineer, User Platform - Java (Remote across ANZ)

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, 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.

What you’d be doing in this role

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 Senior Backend Engineer in one of the Apps API Platform teams, you will play a crucial role in developing and refining the Apps SDK, ensuring that external apps can integrate natively into Canva’s product ecosystem. You will be responsible for architecting new full-stack capabilities, shaping API designs, and collaborating with both internal teams and external developers to build a world-class app experience.

As a technical leader, you’ll drive large-scale projects from ideation to execution, making key architectural decisions that impact Canva’s developer community. You will also mentor other engineers, share best practices, and help define the future of backend development within the Ecosystem Supergroup.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

You’ll have the opportunity to work on some of Canva’s most essential and high-performance backend systems — the User Platform.

Our mission is to scale our authentication platform to support 10x the number of users we have today. To achieve this, you’ll:

• Collaborate within a backend-focused engineering team to extend and scale the backbone of Canva’s microservice landscape — the User Product.
• Design, build, and maintain high-performance systems for user authentication and management.
• Develop reusable and scalable building blocks that enable teams across Canva to build on top of the User Platform.
• Partner with stakeholder teams to evaluate requirements, align timelines, and optimise solutions for customer value.
• Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to incident response as needed.
• Enhance the experience for large Enterprise and Education customers, supporting their advanced organisational needs.

You're probably a match if

• You have experience collaborating effectively with teammates and communicating clearly.
• Are firmly grounded in computer science and engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns.
• Have a strong background in designing, building, and operating high-performance, large-scale Java backend systems.
• Bring a problem-solving mindset to complex challenges.

Nice to have:

• Experience with authentication and authorisation systems (a huge plus).
• Familiarity with SQL.
• Experience with DynamoDB.
• Communicate clearly with strong written and verbal skills.

About the team

In User Platform, we break up existing services and build new ones from scratch to prepare Canva’s authentication platform for the future. We care about software design and its impact on the user. We constantly aim to get the most performance out of AWS resources, and along the way, we ship new features to improve the user experience for Enterprise and Education users.

About the role

As a senior backend engineer, you will be collaborating to build up and scale the backbone of Canva’s User Management: the User Product. The User Product team plays an essential role in keeping our auth pipeline extendable and scalable for our 260 million monthly active users.

You will be involved in designing, building, and maintaining new features to improve and extend the experience for Pro and Enterprise teams and organisations by providing world-class authentication and user management experiences. This role entails constant collaboration with other teams across Canva, giving you a lot of exposure to what other teams are working on and giving you the opportunity to connect the dots.

Other stuff to know

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 don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.