Senior Engineering Manager, Video ; Bay Area

Company Description

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.

Our flagship office is in Sydney, Australia, but we've made our way from down under to a hub in San Francisco, which is now home to our US operations and Video teams. We offer flexibility in how and where you work. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

• Leading and growing a team of high‑performing engineering managers and senior engineers focused on performance across Canva's Video experiences, creating an environment where people can do the best work of their lives.
• Defining and driving the long‑term performance strategy for Canva's Video Group, ensuring our products remain fast, reliable, and scalable as we continue to expand AI‑powered capabilities and serve hundreds of millions of users globally.
• Partnering closely with leaders across Video Engine, AI Research, Product, Design, and Platform teams to align performance investments with company priorities and user outcomes.
• Establishing performance as a first‑class engineering principle by building shared accountability, frameworks, and operating rhythms that enable teams across Canva to proactively identify and address performance challenges.
• Driving large‑scale performance initiatives across web, native, and rendering systems, balancing immediate user‑impacting improvements with long‑term platform investments.
• Building and evolving performance measurement frameworks, telemetry systems, and engineering health metrics that enable data‑driven decision making across the organization.
• Influencing technical direction through architecture reviews, strategic planning, and executive‑level discussions to ensure new capabilities are designed with scalability, efficiency, and maintainability in mind.
• Supporting career development, succession planning, and organisational growth while fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• You have extensive experience leading engineering teams and engineering leaders in fast‑paced, product‑driven environments, with a demonstrated track record of building healthy, high‑performing organisations.
• You bring deep technical expertise in performance engineering, systems optimisation, or platform engineering, with experience working on performance‑critical products at scale.
• You have strong systems thinking across frontend, backend, native platforms, rendering engines, or multimedia systems, and can effectively navigate complex technical trade‑offs.
• You have successfully developed and executed multi‑year technical strategies that delivered measurable improvements in user experience, platform scalability, or engineering efficiency.
• You are skilled at influencing across organisational boundaries, aligning diverse stakeholders around shared goals, and driving execution through ambiguity.
• You communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to audiences ranging from engineers to executive leadership.
• You use data, experimentation, and customer insights to guide decisions and measure impact, balancing long‑term architectural investments with pragmatic business outcomes.

• Experience leading teams working on video technologies, rendering systems, gaming engines, or other real‑time performance‑sensitive platforms.
• Experience with cross‑platform technologies including C++, Web Assembly, graphics pipelines, or native mobile platforms.
• Familiarity with performance optimisation challenges related to Generative AI, model inference, and AI‑powered user experiences.
• Deep understanding of mobile…