Staff Software Engineer - Export

About the Company

About the Role

Responsibilities

• ● Owning the technical direction of how Canva renders designs into files, including the Chromium-based export pipeline, and setting the architecture to keep it reliable as the editor and Chromium evolve.
• ● Being the person the team turns to on the hardest rendering problems, such as upgrade breakages, rendering race conditions, and production incidents caused by upstream Chromium changes.
• ● Deciding how to absorb upstream changes rather than react to them, including monitoring and testing infrastructure that catches Chromium regressions before users do, and designing for Chromium's frequent output structure changes.
• ● Setting the direction for PDF accessibility and compliance (PDF/UA, WCAG) across exported files for Enterprise customers, including decisions on tagging depth, where to draw the line, and what to build versus buy.
• ● Leading on export reliability and performance at the scale of over 50 million weekly downloads, covering format optimisation, distributed systems design, and failure modes that only appear at that volume.
• ● Raising the level of engineers around you through design review, pairing on gnarly debugging sessions, and creating documentation that turns individual Chromium knowledge into team knowledge.
• ● Working across the Editing Platform group and beyond to ensure that teams shipping new editor features know their work will hold up when someone hits download.

Requirements

• ● Deep experience with Chromium or another browser rendering engine, and you've worked inside it rather than just around it.
• ● Comfortable in C++ when a problem takes you into a large third-party codebase, and you can build a clear picture of code you didn't write.
• ● A background in rendering pipelines, graphics programming, or print production systems.
• ● Strong Java backend engineering skills, as that's what the product is built on.
• ● You've owned a technical domain end to end: you set the architecture, made the trade-offs, and lived with the consequences.
• ● You've debugged layered systems where the problem spans multiple codebases and languages, and you've led others through that kind of investigation.
• ● You bring the engineers around you along with you, through mentoring, design review, and the standards you hold.
• ● You've built or maintained systems where upstream dependencies change frequently, and you have a view on how to make that sustainable.
• ● Nice to have: PDF specification knowledge, or experience with PDF generation and post-processing.
• ● Nice to have: Experience with accessibility standards in document or file output.