Staff Software Engineer - Experiments Platform

About the Company and Work Environment

Canva operates flagship offices in Sydney and Melbourne with additional co-working facilities in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. The company fosters flexibility, enabling employees to choose their preferred work setup, including working remotely within Australia. This particular role supports remote work across the country.

Role Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer within Canva's Experimentation Platform team, you will play a critical role in shaping how design and product experimentation are conducted at scale. You'll lead the development and evolution of backend systems that allow teams to set up, monitor, and measure experiments effectively and safely. Your work will support a platform that not only reports outcomes but also promotes good experimentation practices by highlighting signals promptly and triggering alerts when necessary. Additionally, you will explore the integration of AI technologies to automate analysis and accelerate learning cycles.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical solutions for complex backend problems associated with experimentation systems.
• Guide and collaborate with senior leaders and engineering teams to define the platform's future direction.
• Develop and enhance backend platforms that enable experiment setup, user targeting, variant exposure, and outcome measurement.
• Ensure the platform strengthens best practices and improves speed and accuracy of experiment insights.
• Promote team adoption and trust through building reliable, scalable infrastructure that becomes vital to other engineering teams.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Significant experience in backend platform engineering, developing systems critical to other engineering teams.
• Hands-on exposure to large-scale experimentation, including A/B testing, feature management, or progressive rollout mechanisms.
• Proven leadership in devising technical strategies to address ambiguous engineering challenges and mentor others toward outcomes.
• Strong understanding of backend and distributed systems fundamentals—scalability, availability, consistency, and fault tolerance.
• Familiarity with data engineering, analytics, or large-scale data processing relevant to experimentation data flows.
• Knowledge of experimentation concepts such as experiment assignment, user targeting, feature flags, metrics, and guardrails.
• Proficiency in software engineering fundamentals with a preference for Java, though broad language skills and adaptability are valued.

Preferred but Not Required

• Experience building or designing experimentation, feature management, or rollout infrastructures in large organizations or product vendors.
• Cross-disciplinary background combining software engineering with data science, analytics, or data engineering.
• Expertise in feature flag systems, user targeting, progressive rollouts, or automated guardrail implementations.
• Comfortable with statistical concepts and working alongside data scientists.

Team and Impact

This position is part of the Rollout Insights group responsible for company-wide experimentation capabilities. The team collaborates with engineering and data science stakeholders to enable experiment configuration, data analysis, and product decision-making, addressing complex challenges across software and data domains.

Additional Information

Canva offers a dynamic work environment motivated by ambitious goals alongside opportunities for enjoyment and connectivity. The benefits include equity participation, inclusive parental leave, a wellness and social allowance, and flexible leave policies designed to support your wellbeing and personal growth.

Special Hiring Notes

The hiring process includes virtual interviews incorporating real-time technical challenges and AI-based problem-solving to assess candidates’ capabilities effectively. Canva values diversity and inclusion, encouraging applicants from varied backgrounds to apply regardless of exact fit with listed criteria. Pronouns and accommodation needs can be shared during application.