Staff Backend Software Engineer at Canva.
About the role Join the User Platform team at Canva as a Staff Backend Engineer focusing on authorization.
You will be a key technical leader, designing and delivering core components of Canva's access control systems.
This role involves setting technical patterns and collaborating with various teams to implement secure authorization solutions at scale.
Key facts Location: Melbourne, au Engagement: Full-time Team: User Platform
What you'll do
Design, build, and maintain essential parts of Canva's authorization and access control systems, including the centralized SpiceDB-backed platform.
Assist product teams in adopting these capabilities by creating necessary patterns, tools, and integrations.
Make informed technical decisions for critical, high-availability infrastructure that serves hundreds of millions of users.
Collaborate with Security, API Platform, Admin Experience, and product engineering teams to align requirements and ensure adoption.
Contribute to the platform's strategic direction, including identity models, access control models, request context, and authorization for AI workflows.
Mentor and develop engineers within the team on system design and best practices for Identity and Access Management.
Requirements
Direct experience with Identity & Access Management at scale, specifically designing and operating authorization and access control systems (RBAC, ReBAC, ABAC, or Zanzibar-style systems like SpiceDB) in a production environment.




Strong backend engineering skills, including building and running high-performance, high-availability services, with a solid understanding of distributed systems and computer science fundamentals. Java experience is a plus.
Proven system design capabilities, translating complex, cross-cutting problems into manageable, sequenced tasks.
A history of successfully driving the adoption of platform capabilities across engineering teams through explicit technical communication and stakeholder alignment.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a collaborative approach across teams.
Nice to have
Experience with policy languages or authorization engines such as OPA or Cedar.
Familiarity with Zanzibar-style authorization systems like SpiceDB or Google Zanzibar.
Experience evolving large production services without impacting dependent systems.
Skills & tools
Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Authorization and Access Control (RBAC, ReBAC, ABAC, Zanzibar-style)
SpiceDB
Distributed Systems
Java (plus)
System Design
OPA (nice to have)
Cedar (nice to have)
Practical notes
This role is based in Melbourne, Australia, and is a hybrid position offering flexibility for remote work alongside in-person collaboration on campus. Interviews for this position are conducted virtually. When applying, please include your preferred pronouns and any reasonable adjustments needed for the interview process.
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📌 Staff Backend Software Engineer (Melbourne)
🏢 Canva
📍 Melbourne