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Staff Software Engineer - (Portable Platform) Rust/C++

🗓️ Posted 2026-08-13 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Full-time Hybrid ICT

Company shared salary

NA

Market rate

A$15,000–A$22,000/mo (A$180,000–A$264,000/yr)

Based on similar roles (title + domain + location).

About the Company

Job Description Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, 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 Mobile Platform owns how Canva runs on iOS and Android, and the portable libraries layer is one of the most technically interesting pieces of the mobile bet. Every product team at Canva builds on top of what this group ships. Write the foundational libraries once, in a performant system language, and run them everywhere. Rust and C are on the table. The interface, the safety model, and the ergonomics for engineers consuming them across every runtime are the open problems. The strategic bet is a hybrid stack with React Native at its core, supported by a set of portable libraries that run across iOS, Androi

Requirements

  • ● Mobile depth: Built production mobile software on iOS and Android, not just one. You understand the platforms deeply enough to know where they diverge, where they don't, and how to write libraries that feel native on both.
  • ● System languages: Shipped production code in Rust. The portable libraries are the centre of gravity for this role, and they live in this layer.
  • ● Staff altitude: You've been operating where both the problem and the solution are unknown. You walk into ambiguous work saying "this is the shape of the problem, this is what I think we should do, here's where we'll experiment."
  • ● Cross-platform fluency: You understand what it takes to write code that runs well across multiple runtimes. You've thought hard about ABI boundaries, memory safety across language barriers, and the ergonomics of foreign function interfaces.
  • ● Technical communication: You write design docs that other engineers act on. The libraries you build need to be understood by the engineers consuming them, and clear writing is how that happens.
  • ● AI fluency: Used agents in real work. Have a view on what changes for mobile and systems-level engineering when AI is a daily part of the workflow.
  • ● Technical knowledge
  • ● Native interop: Bindings between system languages and the iOS, Android, and JavaScript runtimes that consume them
  • ● Mobile fundamentals: Native iOS and Android depth, not just the JS side of the boundary
  • ● Cross-platform architecture: Portable library design across multiple runtimes
  • ● System languages: Rust or C++ for portable libraries that run across mobile platforms
  • ● Library API design: Making system-language code feel native to the mobile and frontend engineers who consume it
  • ● React Native runtime: Enough fluency to know how your libraries get consumed from the JS side
  • ● Deep fundamentals: Engineering fundamentals from a CS background, including data structures, complexity, the hard parts
  • ● Nice to have
  • ● Live migrations: Production experience evolving a mature mobile product onto a new architecture
  • ● Open-source contributions: React Native, Expo, or the cross-platform mobile ecosystem
  • ● Mobile CI/CD: Release trains and over-the-air updates at scale
  • ● About the Group and Team
  • ● Join Client Platform at Canva, where our mission is to ensure a delightful experience for every user on every device. Client Platform owns the foundations that every product team builds on, including Web Platform, Mobile Platform, and the user-facing surfaces of the product. Hundreds of millions of users sit on top of what this group ships. Every Canva product runs on it.