Staff Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only)

Location: San Francisco, Bay Area only

Salary: USD 262,000–329,000 yearly

Company

Canva develops a global design platform with video creation, rendering, machine learning, and collaborative product experiences.

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, pipeline, native engine, shader, and ML-powered effect layers.
• Collaborate with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams to improve parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience making systems measurably faster and explaining performance results using 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.
• Strong understanding of metrics, large-scale telemetry, regression analysis, concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models.
• Ability to prioritize performance work by user impact and influence teams without direct management responsibility.
• Must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nice to have

• iOS or Android system-level performance experience, especially with older Android devices.
• C++ or Rust experience optimizing native engines, plus knowledge of OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, or WebGPU.
• Knowledge 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 work arrangements with a San Francisco hub for US operations.
• Equity packages and health benefit plans.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution.
• Inclusive parental leave for parents and carers.
• Annual wellbeing and social connection allowance, flexible leave, and virtual interviews.