Canva is looking for an Engineering Manager (Backend) to join our Discovery Platform Group. In this role, you will lead a team responsible for the core infrastructure that powers Canva's search experience, focusing on scalability and performance. You'll drive the evolution of our search platform to support billions of documents and emerging AI capabilities.
What You'll Do
- Lead a high-performing backend engineering team building the indexing, retrieval, and observability infrastructure for search.
- Coach engineers and foster a culture of ownership, experimentation, and growth.
- Drive the technical roadmap to evolve the search platform toward a modular, low-latency architecture.
- Partner with Product Managers and AI/ML teams to support needs like Vector Search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
- Elevate developer velocity through clean APIs, documentation, and self-service tooling.
- Champion system reliability and sustainable on-call practices for critical services.
What We're Looking For
- Experience leading backend teams building and scaling distributed systems, ideally in a search or data-intensive environment.
- A platform builder mindset, focused on enabling others through high-quality infrastructure, clean interfaces, and great documentation.
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and scale, translating vision into execution.
- Understanding of technical trade-offs and confidence navigating discussions between performance, latency, and complexity.
- A people-first leader known for coaching engineers and building high-trust, high-impact teams.
- Leadership with empathy and a belief that great engineering is a human endeavor.
Team & Environment
The Discovery Platform team sits within the Discovery Group.
Benefits & Compensation
- Equity packages.
- 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.
Work Mode
This is a hybrid role open to candidates in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland.
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.
