Staff Software Engineer (Video Performance)

Location: San Francisco; Bay Area only

Salary: USD 262,000–329,000 yearly

Company

Canva develops a collaborative design platform with web and mobile creation experiences.

What you will do

• Own performance across the video creation lifecycle, including template loading, media import, timeline scrubbing, preview, playback, effects, and export on web, iOS, and Android.
• Define video performance metrics and service-level objectives based on user-perceived experience.
• Build telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting, regression detection, profiling, benchmarking, device-lab, and automated performance tooling.
• Deliver measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory usage, and battery life.
• Optimize critical paths across the Native Video Engine, shaders, on-device ML effect pipelines, and backend services.
• Collaborate with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams on parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• Experience making complex systems measurably faster and explaining performance results using data.
• Client-side development experience across web, mobile, or native systems, with the ability to investigate backend and platform code.
• Experience building performance tooling such as profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites, or telemetry pipelines.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU and GPU cost models.
• Working knowledge of video pipelines, including playback, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking, and composition.
• Ability to prioritize by user impact and influence engineering teams across time zones.

Nice to have

• iOS or Android development focused on system-level performance, especially on low-end Android devices.
• C++ or Rust experience, plus familiarity with OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, or WebGPU.
• On-device ML performance work with CoreML, TFLite, TensorRT, or WebAssembly performance tuning.
• Contributions to multimedia or 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 and flexible leave options.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.

Hiring process

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