Staff Software Engineer (Video Performance)

Location: San Francisco, Bay Area only

Salary: USD 262,000–329,000 per year

Company

Canva is a design platform building collaborative tools for creating visual content, including video experiences across web and mobile.

What you will do

• Own performance across the video creation lifecycle, including template loading, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects, and export on web, iOS, and Android.
• Define video performance metrics and service-level objectives that reflect user-perceived experience.
• Build telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting, profiling tools, device labs, benchmarking systems, and automated regression suites.
• Deliver measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory usage, and battery life.
• Optimize critical paths across the native video engine, shaders, backend pipelines, graphics, and ML-powered effects.
• Collaborate with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams to improve parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience making complex systems measurably faster and explaining the results with data.
• Ability to work across product code, backend services, and native or platform layers.
• Experience building performance tooling such as profilers, tracing and instrumentation systems, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites, or telemetry pipelines.
• Comfort with Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler, Chrome DevTools, or comparable performance tools.
• Strong understanding of performance metrics, telemetry at scale, concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models.
• Ability to prioritize by user impact and drive performance improvements through teams without direct management responsibility.

Nice to have

• System-level iOS or Android performance experience, especially on older Android devices.
• C++ or Rust experience optimizing native-engine critical paths, plus knowledge of OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, or WebGPU.
• Understanding of video pipelines, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking, and composition.
• On-device ML performance experience with CoreML, TFLite, or TensorRT.
• WebAssembly performance tuning or contributions to multimedia and graphics projects such as FFmpeg or Chromium.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible ways of working within the San Francisco-based US operation.
• Equity packages and health benefit plans.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution.
• Inclusive parental leave for all parents and carers.
• Annual allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup, plus flexible leave options.

Hiring process

• Interviews are conducted virtually.
• Hiring decisions consider experience, skills, merit, and business needs.