Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Where And How You Can Work

This role is based in Melbourne and is part of our hybrid way of working, giving you the flexibility to work remotely and to come together on campus for meaningful in‑person collaboration when it matters most.

What You’d Be Doing In This Role

Mobile Platform owns how Canva runs on iOS and Android. Every product team at Canva builds on top of what this group ships. Hundreds of millions of users open Canva on a phone or tablet, and the architecture that powers that experience is one of the most important technical bets the company is making right now.

The aim is to build a bespoke solution that utilises React, React Native and Bazel to enable “Build once, ship native” experiences across iOS, Android, and web. The supporting libraries, the runtime, the observability, and the capabilities give every product team what it needs to deliver mobile experiences that feel native on every device a user might pick up.

This role is a leadership position that tackles a very ambitious cross‑platform engineering programme. It requires strong technical direction, the ability to ship real production code quickly, and the vision to shape how Canva builds for the next decade.

Current Focus

- Owning the technical direction for the hybrid stack: build the architecture for a platform that can deploy to all runtimes and maximise reusability without compromising performance and user experience.
- Shipping early and shipping real: in your first six months you’ll be shipping production code to real users.
- Building the mobile capabilities that the next decade needs: define what’s required and own the path to building it.
- Leading with code, not whiteboards: live in the code, ship to production, and push commits.
- Influencing the product groups that depend on this work:



bring teams along and influence their direction.
- Sparring with strong peers: join a small group of Principal and Staff engineers shaping the frontend and mobile stack.
- Influential Individual Contributor: lead and mentor Staff and Senior engineers and oversee their architectural decisions.
- What success looks like: the hybrid stack ships to production and feels native on every device; the architecture holds up as the product grows; the patterns are adopted across the frontend, iOS and Android specialties.

Match Criteria

We’d love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don’t need to meet all of them, but the more the better.

Experience

- Hybrid stack expertise: Built or significantly evolved a large‑scale hybrid mobile architecture in production. React Native and React is ideal, but a credible alternative with cross‑platform mobile depth also works.
- Migration at scale: Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture on a live, growing product.
- Principal leadership: Operated where both the problem and the solution are unknown, and the work spans the whole company.
- Cross‑platform fluency: Deep mobile fundamentals across iOS and Android, and an instinct for how the same patterns map across web.
- Active individual contribution: Still writing and committing code on a daily basis.
- AI fluency: Used agentic orchestration in real work and have a view on how AI changes mobile engineering.





Technical Knowledge

- React Native: Production experience at scale.
- Mobile runtime: Bundle delivery, native module boundaries, performance profiling on real device.
- iOS and Android: Native fundamentals on both.
- Cross‑platform architecture: Build once, ship to multiple runtimes without losing native feel.
- Mobile performance: Performance, reliability monitoring, and optimisation at scale.
- Deep fundamentals: Engineering fundamentals from a CS background, including data structures, complexity, and the hard parts.

Nice to Have

- Live migrations: Production experience evolving a mature mobile product onto a recent architecture.
- System languages: Rust or C for portable libraries that run across mobile platforms.
- Open‑source contributions: React Native, Expo, or the cross‑platform mobile ecosystem.
- Mobile CI/CD: Release trains and over‑the‑air updates at scale.

About The Team

You’ll be joining our Client Platform group, which owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and the user‑facing surfaces of the product. Mobile Platform is responsible for how Canva runs on iOS and Android.

Benefits

- Equity packages
- Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
- An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
- Flexible leave options that empower you to recharge and support you personally

Information for Applicants

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

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📌 Principal Software Engineer - Mobile Platform (Melbourne)
🏢 Canva
📍 Melbourne