Staff Software Engineer (Video Performance)

Location: San Francisco Bay Area only

Salary: USD 262,000–329,000 per year

Company

Canva develops a global visual design platform with web and native 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 based on real user experience.
• Build telemetry, tracing, dashboards, alerting, regression detection, profiling tools, device labs, and automated performance suites.
• Deliver measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory usage, and battery life.
• Improve 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 to improve parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• Experience making software systems measurably faster and explaining the results with 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.
• Experience defining meaningful metrics, analyzing telemetry at scale, identifying regressions, and validating optimizations.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU and GPU cost models.
• Ability to prioritize user impact and deliver performance improvements through teams without direct management responsibility.

Nice to have

• iOS or Android system-level performance experience, especially with older Android devices.
• C++ or Rust experience optimizing native engine critical paths, plus knowledge of OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, or WebGPU.
• Understanding of video pipelines, 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

• Work with a global Video Group distributed across Sydney, San Francisco, and Beijing.
• Equity package and health benefit plans.
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution.
• Inclusive parental leave for parents and carers.
• Annual wellbeing and workplace allowance, flexible leave options, and virtual interviews.