Senior Software Engineer - Performance Monitoring

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. 

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have choice in where and how you work. That means if you want to do your thing in the office (if you're near one), at home or a bit of both, it's up to you. 

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

To deliver best-in-class performance monitoring across Canva, you’ll drive initiatives across three key areas:

Building the right tooling & infrastructure

• Designing and maintaining lightweight SDKs, dashboards, and CI/PR checks that surface key performance metrics like LCP, INP, and CLS.

• Embedding OpenTelemetry standards and extending pipelines that ingest billions of real-user events daily.

• Collaborating with platform and infrastructure teams to enable low-overhead metric collection through reusable libraries, CLIs, and tools.

Strengthening performance analysis & guardrails

• Rolling out “no-merge-if-slower” checks that statistically flag or block regressions, complete with developer-friendly diff reports.

• Investigating systemic bottlenecks end-to-end using tools like Chrome DevTools and Lighthouse to reproduce and resolve issues.

• Mining real-user and synthetic data to identify high-ROI opportunities to improve monitoring tools and uncover performance gaps.

Driving enablement & a performance-first culture

• Publishing guides and playbooks to help product teams triage and resolve issues quickly.

• Leading technical reviews, mentoring sessions, and brown-bag talks to embed “fast by default” into engineering workflows.

• Bootstrapping a performance knowledge MCP server and AI-powered chatbot to provide context-aware performance support across Canva.

You're probably a match if you have:

• JavaScript frontend expertise – Proven experience designing, building, and shipping rich JavaScript/TypeScript interfaces using React.

• Full-stack fluency – Comfortable working across the stack, diving into Node-based services, data pipelines, and modern CI/CD workflows when performance demands it.

• A data-driven mindset – You balance intuition with evidence, design statistically sound experiments, and let data guide your decisions.

• Clear communication skills – You can turn a flame graph or p95 latency spike into a compelling story for engineers, PMs, and executives alike.

• Stakeholder influence & “managing up” – Skilled at aligning priorities and driving action across product, platform, and leadership teams.

Bonus points if you also have:

• Deep web-performance knowledge – Expertise in rendering pipelines, main-thread bottlenecks, network protocols, and the latest performance APIs.

• Experience with large-scale observability & RUM – Hands-on familiarity with tools like Real User Monitoring, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Looker, or Mode—especially at high event scale.

• Strong TypeScript skills – Comfortable writing robust, well-typed code across both client and server environments.

About the team

Our ambition hasn’t changed since day one: make Canva the fastest graphic design platform on the planet. As a Senior Engineer in the Performance Monitoring team you’ll lead the charge—building tools, shaping culture, and guiding engineering practices so that brilliant performance is the default, not a nice-to-have.

About the role

At Canva, performance isn’t just a metric—it’s a product feature. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Performance Monitoring team, you’ll be the specialist who turns complex telemetry into tangible speed for millions of designers worldwide.

• Performance guardian – You own the end-to-end observability stack for real-user monitoring, synthetic tests, and alerting pipelines—ensuring regressions never reach production.

• Platform builder – From TypeScript-first SDKs to CI pipelines, you’ll craft the tooling that enables every Canva engineer to measure, diagnose, and fix performance issues in real time.

• Culture catalyst – You’ll champion a “performance-first” mindset by leading operational reviews, writing playbooks, and mentoring teammates—so that fast becomes our default expectation.

• Cross-product collaborator – Whether it’s the design editor, templates marketplace, or AI features, you’ll partner with frontend, backend, and infrastructure groups to make every surface feel instant.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a stack of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too

• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers

• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more

• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.