Principal Software Engineer - Mobile Platform

Requirements

• Migration at scale: Led a meaningful migration of a mature mobile product onto a new architecture. The interesting signal is doing this on a live, growing product, not a clean-slate rebuild. Bonus if the work touched hundreds of engineers and shipped to a large user base.
• Principal leadership: You've operated where both the problem and the solution are unknown, and the work spans the whole company. You cut through the noise and bring a large number of leaders to cons

Benefits

Additional Information

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 Collingwood is home to our Melbourne campus - a vibrant, creative hub for connection and impactful work. While Sydney is home to our HQ, Melbourne brings its own unique vibe, with local artwork, lush greenery, and thoughtfully designed spaces to help you collaborate, focus, and feel part of a welcoming community. This role is based in Melbourne, 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. 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 bespoke solution that utilises React, React Native and Bazel to enable "Build once, ship native" experiences across iOS, Android, and web. The supporting libraries (many of which will be written in a system language), the runtime, the observability, the capabilities every product team needs to deliver mobile experiences that feel native on every device a user might pick up. There's a second reason this work matters now. This will be a role to lead a world class problem that not many have solved or even seen before. It's one of the more ambitious cross-platform engineering programs that requires strong leadership to navigate frontend, mobile, platform and infra challenges, and the decisions made in this role shape how Canva builds for the next decade. At the moment, this role is focused on: 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. This includes React, React Native, the supporting libraries, and integrations of bespoke editing and rendering systems. Shipping early and shipping real: This isn't a multi-year research project. The company is moving fast on this work. In your first six months you'll be shipping production code to real users, alongside the team. Building the mobile capabilities that the next decade needs: The fundamentals of how the application is assembled. The capabilities every product team will need to deliver native experiences. You'll define what's needed and own the path to building it. Leading with code, not whiteboards: Canva doesn't have an architecture function - Principal engineers stay hands-on, and this role leans more hands-on than most. You'll live in the code, ship to production, and push commits. Influencing the product groups that depend on this work: As the first phase ships, you'll partner with the product groups whose experiences integrate into the hybrid application. This is influence-driven work - bringing teams along, not handing them a mandate. Sparring with strong peers: You'll join a small group of Principal and Staff engineers shaping how Canva's frontend and mobile stack works. Influential Individual Contributor: While you'll have no direct reports, you'll be leading and mentoring Staff and Senior engineers and overseeing their architectural decisions. What success looks like: The hybrid stack ships to production and feels native on every device users open Canva on. The architecture holds up as the product grows and as more teams build on top of it. The patterns set by this role are adopted across the frontend, iOS and Android specialties as the default way to build for mobile. You're probably a match if... 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 and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.

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