Senior Backend Engineer (Java, AI Media Transforms)

Location: Vienna, Austria

Salary: Starting from EUR 80,000 per year

Company

Canva is a design platform developing AI-powered media editing capabilities and products for users worldwide.

What you will do

• Own the Java backend service connecting Canva product surfaces with GPU model workers.
• Design APIs, protocol contracts, job and task state machines, asynchronous pipelines, queue-driven worker orchestration, persistence, moderation, and failure handling.
• Deliver new AI editing capabilities such as inpainting, upscaling, and background removal from API design through feature-flagged production rollout.
• Operate GPU-backed services at scale, including autoscaling, capacity planning, health probes, regional rollouts, deployment testing, and on-call support.
• Improve request latency and cost across queueing, media processing, GPU execution, moderation, and storage.
• Set backend direction, lead design reviews, and collaborate with product, ML, research, inference, and consumer teams.

Requirements

• Significant commercial experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems.
• High proficiency in Java or a similar JVM language such as Kotlin or Scala.
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency, distributed systems, performance engineering, and scalable service design.
• Experience building asynchronous job systems with queues, workers, state machines, retries, timeouts, and partial-failure handling.
• Experience with operational ownership, including metrics, dashboards, autoscaling, deployment configuration, and progressive rollouts.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives, evolve APIs safely, and communicate complex trade-offs clearly.

Nice to have

• Experience working with ML engineers and researchers.
• Comfort writing Python for worker entry points, job handlers, or deployment configuration.
• Experience with GPU-backed workloads and latency, capacity, or cost optimization.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible choice in how and where work is organized within the Austrian operations.
• Equity package.
• Inclusive parental leave for parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options and virtual interviews.