Principal Software Engineer (Mobile Platform)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (Mobile Platform): Building and evolving Canva’s hybrid mobile platform that powers iOS and Android experiences with an accent on React, React Native, Bazel-based architecture, and cross-platform “build once, ship native” performance. Focus on leading production migrations and shipping production code to real users while staying hands-on with code, observability, and mobile runtime fundamentals.

Location: Sydney, Australia (hybrid: remote work plus in-person collaboration on campus)

Company

Canva builds design experiences used by hundreds of millions of people across devices.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction and architecture for a hybrid stack that deploys across iOS, Android, and web while maximizing reusability without sacrificing performance or UX.
• Ship production code to real users within the first six months, not a long research effort.
• Define and build the mobile capabilities that product teams need to deliver native-feeling experiences on every device.
• Lead with code by staying hands-on, pushing commits, and influencing architectural decisions through direct engineering work.
• Partner with product groups whose experiences integrate into the hybrid application, driving alignment through influence.
• Mentor and guide Staff and Senior engineers and help set architectural patterns adopted across frontend, iOS, and Android specialties.

Requirements

• Experience building or significantly evolving a large-scale hybrid mobile architecture in production, ideally with React Native and React, shipping complex shared-code mobile experiences to both iOS and Android.
• Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture on a live, growing product (not a clean-slate rebuild), ideally at large scale.
• Principal-level leadership: operating where both the problem and solution are unclear, spanning company-wide impact and aligning leaders on technical direction.
• Deep mobile fundamentals across iOS and Android, with strong understanding of how patterns map across web and where platforms diverge.
• Active individual contribution: writing and committing code day to day.
• AI fluency: used agentic orchestration in real work and understands how AI changes mobile engineering workflows.

Nice to have

• Experience with live migrations evolving mature mobile products onto new architectures.
• System languages for portable libraries (Rust or C).
• Open-source contributions in the React Native / Expo ecosystem.
• Mobile CI/CD experience (release trains and over-the-air updates at scale).

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working model with flexibility to work remotely and come together on campus for in-person collaboration.
• Equity packages.
• Inclusive parental leave policy for all parents and carers.
• Annual wellbeing and connection allowance (“Vibe & Thrive”).
• Flexible leave options to support recovery and personal needs.
• Interviews are conducted virtually.