Canva is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to build and scale the core infrastructure and features powering our data visualisation platform. In this role, you'll drive key technical decisions, collaborate across teams, and own the reliability and performance of critical services.
What You'll Do
- Work proactively with stakeholders using team tools like Slack, Jira, and GitHub, identifying issues and requesting support as needed.
- Drive decision-making processes, ensuring the right people are involved based on the importance and urgency of each decision.
- Foster productive discussions with strong opinions held weakly, encouraging critical thinking and maintaining a high-feedback culture.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, and Data teams to plan viable, desirable, and feasible solutions.
- Build technical solutions using Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Terraform, and AI, upholding high code review standards.
- Deploy and manage services in AWS staging and production environments.
- Improve system reliability through testing, observability, monitoring, and deployment automation.
- Participate in support rotations and incident management.
- Evaluate and improve team processes through regular reflection and experimentation.
What We're Looking For
- Strong experience with Node.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL.
- Strong experience building API-based backend services.
- Strong experience with AWS services (Aurora RDS, SQS, S3, Lambda, etc.).
- Strong experience supporting SaaS products end-to-end.
- Experience with system observability, reliability, and CI/CD.
- Experience with infrastructure as code via Terraform.
- Experience hardening application security (authentication, access management, encryption, auditing).
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with full-stack JavaScript development.
Technical Stack
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Terraform
- AWS
- AI
Team & Environment
You will be part of the Flourish Platform space, a team with a mix of backgrounds and distinct mixes of frontend, backend, and infrastructure experience.
We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds. We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.
