Staff Software Engineer - Rust in Sydney

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Our flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It's a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect. This role is based in Sydney, and we're looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in‐person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you'd be doing in this role:

• Owning the portable libraries problem space: Define and build the libraries that run across iOS, Android, and web. The interface, the safety model, and the ergonomics for consumers in every runtime are yours to shape.
• Working in system languages: Rust and C++ are the tools for the foundational layer. Build production‐grade libraries that need to be fast, safe, and reliable across every device Canva ships to.
• Joining a technical leadership group: This isn't a lone‐Staff seat. You'll work alongside other Staff engineers shaping the mobile platform's technical direction, with room to flex into the problems where your strengths land hardest.
• Leading with code, not whiteboards: Canva doesn't have an architecture function — Staff engineers stay hands‐on. This role is heavily hands‐on. The work is the work.
• Communicating across the stack: The libraries you build will be consumed by frontend engineers who don't write Rust. Strong technical communication isn't a nice‐to‐have for this role. It's how the work lands.
• Sparring with strong peers: The technical debate is hard, fast, and substantive. Bring strong opinions, change your mind when better evidence shows up. The bar is high.
• Influential Individual Contributor: No direct reports. But how you operate sets the standard others reach for.

What success looks like:

• The portable libraries ship to production and run reliably across iOS, Android, and web. The interface feels native to the engineers consuming it from every runtime. The patterns set by this role become the foundation that other mobile work at Canva builds on.

You're probably a match if you fit one or more of these:

• Mobile depth: Built production mobile software on iOS and Android, not just one. You understand the platforms deeply enough to know where they diverge, where they don't, and how to write libraries that feel native on both.
• System languages: Shipped production code in Rust. The portable libraries are the centre of gravity for this role, and they live in this layer.
• Staff altitude: You've been operating where both the problem and the solution are unknown. You walk into ambiguous work saying "this is the shape of the problem, this is what I think we should do, here's where we'll experiment."
• Cross‐platform fluency: You understand what it takes to write code that runs well across multiple runtimes. You've thought hard about ABI boundaries, memory safety across language barriers, and the ergonomics of foreign function interfaces.
• Technical communication: You write design docs that other engineers act on. The libraries you build need to be understood by the engineers consuming them, and clear writing is how that happens.
• AI fluency: Used agents in real work. Have a view on what changes for mobile and systems‐level engineering when AI is a daily part of the workflow.

About the Group and Team:

Join Client Platform 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. Every Canva product runs on it.

Mobile Platform is the group inside Client Platform responsible for how Canva runs on iOS and Android. We're the team for engineers who care deeply about mobile performance, who want to shape how cross‐platform mobile gets built at scale, and who want to own the next decade of how Canva runs on a phone or tablet.

What's in it for you?

• 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.

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.