Senior Software Engineer - Automation, Remote across ANZ

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Lead complex transformation initiatives: Own and drive high-impact, multi-system automation projects from discovery through production. Navigate complex stakeholder landscapes and coordinate with business partners to deliver business-critical solutions.

• Architect scalable solutions: Design elegant, maintainable system architectures that balance immediate needs with long-term scalability. Make thoughtful technical trade-offs and guide the team toward sustainable approaches.

• Build advanced platform capabilities: Create sophisticated frameworks, libraries, and tools that enable other engineers to move faster and solve classes of problems rather than individual instances.

• Pioneer AI integration patterns: Lead the way in applying AI technologies to business automation. Experiment with cutting-edge approaches, determine what works in practice, and establish patterns others can follow.

• Write production-grade code: Author code that exemplifies engineering excellence. Set the standard for code quality, testing, documentation, and operational readiness.

• Provide technical leadership: Conduct design reviews, provide architectural guidance, and help engineers across the team solve complex technical challenges. Be the person others turn to when stuck.

• Mentor and develop others: Actively coach less experienced engineers through pairing, code reviews, and technical discussions. Identify skill gaps and help create learning opportunities for the team.

• Consult with business partners: Work directly with involve multiple systems and stakeholders to understand strategic initiatives, identify automation opportunities, and translate business needs into technical solutions.

• Establish engineering standards: Define and document best practices for intelligent automation at Canva. Create the technical standards, patterns, and processes that ensure quality and consistency as the team scales.

• Drive operational excellence: Implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting. Lead incident response for critical issues. Conduct blameless postmortems and drive systemic improvements to platform reliability.

• Shape team direction: Contribute to roadmap planning and technical strategy. Help prioritise work based on business impact and technical considerations.

• Contribute to recruiting: Conduct technical interviews, train interviewers, participate in decision meetings, and help attract exceptional talent to the team.

You're probably a match if you have

Technical leadership

• Deep software engineering expertise: Strong computer science fundamentals with a track record of designing and delivering complex, scalable systems. You're known for writing excellent code and architecting elegant solutions.

• Expert-level coding proficiency: Extensive experience building services, tools, and automation with your language of preference; Python is the recommended one for this position and will have to be learned if not natural. You understand the language deeply and can leverage advanced features appropriately. Node.js experience is a strong bonus.

• Cloud platform mastery: Deep experience with AWS and/or GCP, understanding how to architect cloud-native solutions that are secure, scalable, and cost-effective.

• System integration expertise: Proven ability to integrate complex systems, design APIs, handle data transformations, and architect solutions that span multiple platforms.

• Platform engineering experience: Background building internal platforms or developer tools. You understand how to create abstractions that enable others and how platforms evolve at scale.

AI and automation excellence

• Advanced AI technology usage: Extensive hands-on experience leveraging AI tools and integrating language models into applications. You understand the capabilities and limitations of current AI technologies and how to apply them pragmatically.

• Automation platform expertise: Ideally experience with workflow automation platforms (n8n, Workato, CrewAI, etc.) or the ability to quickly become an expert. You understand workflow engines, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.

• Strategic automation thinking: You see patterns across problems and design solutions that unlock entire classes of automation. You think in terms of platforms and frameworks, not just individual solutions.

Leadership and impact

• Independent operator: Track record of leading complex initiatives with minimal guidance. You proactively identify high-impact opportunities, scope them effectively, and drive them to completion.

• Technical Leadership: Experience coordinating work across multiple teams, aligning diverse stakeholders, and navigating complex organisational dynamics to deliver results.

• Technical mentorship: Proven ability to coach and develop other engineers. You enjoy teaching, conducting effective design reviews, and helping others level up their skills.

• Stakeholder management: Strong executive presence and communication skills. Comfortable presenting to business stakeholders, building trust with non-technical stakeholders, and translating between business and technical domains.

• Strategic thinking: You connect short-term deliverables to long-term platform vision. You help teams understand how their work fits into broader strategies and help prioritise based on business impact.

Working style

• Adaptable and versatile: Thrives in ambiguous, rapidly changing environments. Comfortable context-switching between different technologies, domains, and levels of abstraction.

• Pragmatic problem solver: Makes sound engineering trade-offs that balance quality, speed, and business value. Knows when to build, when to buy, and when to script together a quick solution.

• Collaborative influencer: Builds relationships across organisational boundaries. Earns trust through competence and empathy. Influences through expertise rather than authority.

• Operational ownership: Takes full accountability for systems in production. Implements comprehensive observability, responds to incidents effectively, and drives continuous improvement.

• Culture builder: Models engineering excellence and helps establish the culture and practices that will scale as the team grows.

About the team

The Technology Experience group is one of Canva's internal platform organisations, responsible for making everyone at Canva more productive and effective. Within this group, teams combined have the mission to transform business operations through automation and/or AI-powered workflows.

We're the "DevOps engineers of business operations" - actively hunting for opportunities to eliminate manual work, accelerate processes, and build platform capabilities that scale. We partner closely with non-eng orgs like GTM, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Legal and People teams, working across the entire business to reimagine what's possible with modern automation technology.

This team will operate with a unique embedded model where engineers work directly with business domain experts, deeply understand their challenges, then architect and build transformative solutions. We're building on platforms like n8n and Workato, extending Canva's internal systems, and creating the reusable components and patterns that form our growing Intelligent Automation platform.

As a senior engineer on this team, you'll be a technical leader and pioneer. You'll define what great looks like, establish engineering standards for our domain, mentor less experienced engineers, and drive initiatives that have team-wide impact. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape a new capability at Canva.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too

• 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

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We’re evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience - you’ll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect.

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

We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.