Staff Software Engineer - Video Performance (Video Performance)

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States

Salary: USD 262,000–329,000 per year

Company

Canva is a design platform with global teams building collaborative creative and multimedia products.

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 performance.
• Build telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and regression detection systems.
• Develop profiling, benchmarking, device-lab, and automated performance tooling for video engineers.
• Improve latency, frame stability, memory usage, and battery life across product, native engine, shader, ML, and backend pipelines.
• Collaborate with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams on parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• Experience making real systems measurably faster and explaining performance results with data.
• Ability to work across product code, backend services, native layers, and unfamiliar technology stacks.
• Experience building profiling, tracing, instrumentation, benchmarking, regression, or telemetry tooling used by other engineers.
• Ability to define meaningful metrics, analyze telemetry at scale, identify regressions, and validate optimizations.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models.
• Must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nice to have

• iOS or Android system-performance experience, especially on older Android devices.
• C++ or Rust experience optimizing native-engine critical paths, plus graphics API knowledge including OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, or WebGPU.
• Understanding of video 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 hub.
• Equity packages and health benefit plans.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution.
• Inclusive parental leave and flexible leave options.
• Annual allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.

Hiring process

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