Staff Software Engineer (Video)

Location: Sydney, Australia. Hybrid role with regular in-person collaboration at the Sydney campus; remote work is available within the hybrid arrangement.

Company

Canva is a design platform whose Media Product Platform enables video editing, playback, hosting, and delivery for millions of users.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain high-performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools for audio and video processing.
• Design distributed systems for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering multimedia content at scale.
• Build platform capabilities supporting video editing, playback, transcoding, and multimedia delivery.
• Optimise processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, video quality, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and design teams to improve video experiences.
• Drive testing, code reviews, operational practices, continuous improvement, and resolution of complex production issues.

Requirements

• Strong commercial experience building scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++.
• Deep knowledge of concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, software architecture, and design patterns.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures in production cloud environments.
• Experience diagnosing, debugging, and resolving complex performance and reliability issues.
• Experience with video codecs such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, or AV1.
• Experience with FFmpeg or GStreamer, including source-level debugging, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development, plus large-scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery.

Nice to have

• Contributions to FFmpeg, GStreamer, or other open-source multimedia projects.
• Experience with adaptive bitrate streaming technologies such as DASH, HLS, or CMAF.
• Experience tuning encoding pipelines for video quality, storage efficiency, and delivery performance.
• Experience with Java-based services in large-scale distributed environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with flexibility to balance remote work and collaboration on campus.
• Equity package.
• Inclusive parental leave for all parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options and virtual interviews.