Principal Software Engineer - User Platform Team

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Join the team powering the foundation of Canva's world-class user experience. 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 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. 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. You'll lead the technical direction for video technology that powers millions of daily exports, architecting scalable, high-performance rendering systems and pioneering AI-powered video features. You'll work alongside talented engineers, tackling complex problems and pushing the boundaries of browser-based video creation. At the moment, this role is focused on You'll own the technical direction for User Platform's most complex cross-cutting programmes - Centralised Permissions & AuthZ, Profile Decomposition, and Authentication Platform - setting the architectural strategy and driving delivery across teams. You'll serve as the platform's principal-level authority across Identity & Access Management, providing credible technical leadership to Security, API Platform, Admin Experience, and product engineering simultaneously. You'll architect and oversee the migration of 3,000+ access checks into a structurally-enforced authorisation platform (SpiceDB/Zanzibar-style), designing the adoption patterns and microsyncs infrastructure that makes this tractable at Canva's scale. You'll make high-stakes technical trade-offs for critical infrastructure - including profile service decomposition and authentication pluggability - balancing reliability, velocity, and security for systems serving hundreds of millions of users. You'll mentor and technically enable the broader User Platform engineering team, raising the bar on system design, technical communication, and IAM best practices across a team of strong senior and staff engineers. You'll represent User Platform's technical strategy at the executive and cross-group level, telling the right story to motivate adoption and alignment across the business. You're probably a match if We're looking for a technical leader who has deep, hard-won expertise in Identity & Access Management at scale - someone who has built or significantly evolved Zanzibar-style authorisation systems, zero-trust identity architectures, or large-scale authentication platforms in production. You understand that platform work at this level is as much about influence and adoption as it is about technical correctness: you know how to drive widespread change across large engineering organisations, and you can make complex IAM concepts legible and compelling to engineers and executives alike. You combine deep hands-on technical ability with the strategic seniority to operate as a true principal across multiple groups, and you're energised by the challenge of working at the intersection of security, reliability, and developer experience. Most importantly, you want to work on problems that matter - systems that will power the next billion Canva users. Essential Technical Expertise Deep expertise in Identity & Access Management at scale: experience designing and operating Zanzibar-style authorisation systems (e.g. SpiceDB, Google Zanzibar, OPA), zero-trust identity architectures, and large-scale authentication platforms. Proven track record of driving platform adoption across large engineering organisations (300+ engineering teams), including technical communication, stakeholder alignment, and change management at scale. Strong system architecture and technical leadership skills, with experience making high-stakes trade-offs for critical, high-availability infrastructure. Experience decomposing and evolving monolithic services in production, with a track record of improving reliability without disrupting dependents. Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate senior engineers, and to represent complex technical decisions credibly to executive audiences. About the Group User Platform at Canva are a platform team, responsible for the AuthZ/N infrastructure that serves as a backbone to Canva Products. User Platform own the identity, authentication, authorisation, user profile, and account systems that connect hundreds of millions of users to the tools they love - and that every product team at Canva depends on to function. Our work directly enables Canva's ambition to beco