Senior Backend Software Engineer

About the Group/Team

You’ll be joining the Growth Enablement team, part of Canva’s International Supergroup. Our mission is to help Canva expand into new markets by building systems that enable truly local experiences for users around the world. We work closely with teams across product, engineering, and growth to ensure Canva can seamlessly adapt to different regions. Your mission is to help users get the support they need — whether that’s through self-serve tools, personalized help centers, or direct support from our specialist teams.

About the Role/Specialty

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the design and development of services that power our user support ecosystem. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role that requires a strong systems mindset and the ability to work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and data teams. You’ll play a key role in shaping the architecture, improving data pipelines, and building APIs that connect users with the right help — at the right time. You'll gain hands-on experience in writing reusable code and technical documentation while leading projects, driving experiments, and collaborate with multiple teams. This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced engineer skilled in communication and designing systems that balance simplicity and flexibility.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)
At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that power support handover and specialist experiences.
• Build systems to intelligently route users to the right help channel (e.g., chat, email, specialized teams) based on context, location, language, and product signals.
• Work closely with product, design, and operations stakeholders to deeply understand user and specialist needs.
• Optimize performance, reliability, and observability of our support systems.
• Lead technical discovery, design reviews, and architecture planning for high-impact projects.
• Mentor engineers and promote a high standard of engineering excellence across the group.

What we're looking for
You’re probably a match if:

• Strong backend development experience, ideally with Java or similar languages.
• A systems thinker — you understand how to build reliable, maintainable, and scalable distributed systems.
• Experience working with service-to-service APIs, data enrichment pipelines, or intelligent routing systems is a strong plus.
• A product mindset — you think beyond the code and care deeply about the user experience, both for end-users and internal support specialists.
• Proven ability to lead projects end-to-end and collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and operations teams.
• Experience in support platforms, workflow orchestration, or customer-facing systems is beneficial but not required.

What the candidate will learn and how will they develop at Canva

• The opportunity for growth is huge – creating company-wide solutions, and seeing them through long-term.
• You’ll be able to work in a fast-moving environment and see how your ideas work at scale. 
• We want this to be a mutually rewarding relationship, so we’ll support your growth and development throughout your time at Canva.