Principal Software Engineer - Mobile Platform

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. 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.

What you’d be doing in this role:

• Set the technical direction: Own the key architectural decisions for Canva’s hybrid mobile platform across React Native, iOS and Android, including what should be shared, what should remain native, and how those layers work together.
• Get the new platform into production: In your first few months, you’ll turn the architecture into shipped code, with the foundations for performance, reliability and observability in place.
• Prove it on a real product surface: Within six months, the goal is to have a React Native surface live in production, supported by stable capabilities and platform primitives that feature teams can build on.
• Lead senior engineers through the migration: Be the architectural anchor for Staff and Senior engineers across Mobile Platform, helping them navigate difficult technical decisions as the new platform takes shape.
• Scale adoption across Canva: In the new year, work with major product teams moving onto the platform, establishing patterns engineers trust and choose to use.

You're probably a match if... We’d love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these:

• Experience Cross-platform architecture at scale: Built or significantly evolved a large-scale cross-platform mobile architecture in production.
• Migration at scale: Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture while it remained live and growing.
• Principal-level technical leadership: Set technical direction across multiple teams where the answer wasn’t obvious, brought senior engineers and leaders with you, and had Staff-level engineers building against the direction you established.
• Organisation-wide influence: You’ve shaped architecture beyond your immediate team, creating platforms, standards or technical direction adopted across multiple groups or a large engineering organisation.
• Hands-on technical depth: You’re still close to the code and comfortable working through hard implementation details, not just setting direction from a distance.
• Engineering judgement: You don’t need to arrive as a React Native evangelist. You do need to reason from first principles, challenge assumptions constructively and help make Canva’s chosen architecture successful at scale.

Technical knowledge:

• Mobile runtime: Shared-code runtimes, native boundaries, bundle delivery and performance profiling on real devices.
• iOS and Android: Deep fundamentals across both platforms and a strong instinct for where shared abstractions stop making sense.
• Mobile performance: Performance, reliability, crash monitoring and optimisation at scale.
• Platform architecture: Shared capabilities, libraries, abstractions and infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
• Deep fundamentals: Strong engineering fundamentals, including data structures, complexity and system-level trade-offs.

Nice to have:

• React Native at scale: Deep production experience with React Native and React internals.
• System languages: Rust or C/C++ for portable libraries that run across mobile platforms.
• Open-source contributions: React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Expo or the wider cross-platform mobile ecosystem.
• Mobile CI/CD: Release trains and over-the-air updates at scale.
• AI fluency: You’ve used AI tooling in real engineering work and have a view on how it changes the way mobile teams build and operate software.

About the team:

You’ll be joining our Client Platform group at Canva, where our mission is to ensure a delightful experience for every user on every device. Client Platform owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and the user-facing surfaces of the product. Hundreds of millions of users sit on top of what this group ships. Mobile Platform is the group inside Client Platform responsible for how Canva runs on iOS and Android.

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.

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.