Staff Software Engineer - Video - Content And Discovery

Location & Remote Work

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.

Responsibilities

- Develop and maintain high‑performance C++ services, frameworks, and tools that power Canva’s audio and video processing platform.
- Design and implement distributed systems that efficiently ingest, process, store, and deliver multimedia content to millions of users globally.
- Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers to enable exceptional video editing and playback experiences across Canva.
- Optimise multimedia processing pipelines for reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
- Build new platform capabilities that support Canva’s rapidly growing video and multimedia ecosystem.
- Drive engineering excellence through testing, code reviews, operational best practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Troubleshoot complex production challenges and contribute to the long‑term evolution of Canva’s video infrastructure.

Qualifications

- You have strong commercial experience building highly scalable, secure, and performant backend systems using C++.
- You’re deeply grounded in computer science and software engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading, memory management, data structures, architecture, and design patterns.
- You have experience designing and operating distributed systems and scalable backend architectures.




- You have hands‑on experience working with cloud platforms and services in production environments.
- You are highly skilled at diagnosing, debugging, and resolving complex performance and reliability issues.
- You have excellent communication and collaboration skills and enjoy working across engineering, product, and design teams.
- You are passionate about audio and video technologies and excited by the challenge of processing multimedia content at a massive scale.
- You have experience with modern video codecs such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, or AV1.
- You have deep experience with multimedia frameworks and libraries such as FFmpeg and/or GStreamer, including source‑level debugging, architecture analysis, performance profiling, and custom patch development.
- You have built large‑scale video ingestion, storage, transcoding, processing, and delivery systems.
- You have a strong understanding of multimedia containers and formats such as MP4 and WebM.

Nice to Have

- Contributions to FFmpeg, GStreamer, or other open‑source multimedia projects.
- Experience optimising video playback through adaptive bitrate streaming technologies such as DASH, HLS, or CMAF.
- Experience tuning encoding pipelines to improve video quality, storage efficiency, and delivery performance.
- Experience working with Java‑based services in large‑scale distributed environments.

Benefits

- Equity packages – we want our success to be yours too.
- Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and carers.
- An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup and more.
- Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge, and support you personally.

Equal Prospect

When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

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📌 Staff Software Engineer - Video - Content And Discovery (City of Sydney)
🏢 Nearheal(trading as Nearheal
📍 City of Sydney