About the role
Canva Engineering Manager - Video Performance (Bay area only) | SmartRecruiters Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Apple Safari Mozilla Firefox Engineering Manager - Video Performance (Bay area only) Full-time Recruitment type: Permanent 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. Where and how you can work 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 now 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. Job Description What you’d be doing in this role 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. At the moment, this role is focused on: Hiring, mentoring, and supporting a specialized team of performance and systems engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, thoughtful decision-making, and continuous improvement. Shaping the long-term performance roadmap for the Video Group and prioritizing high-impact initiatives — from low-level engine improvements to real-time AI optimization. Partnering closely with Video Engine, AI Research, Product, and Design teams to ensure performance is considered early and often in product development. Championing performance-aware engineering practices across the broader organization and building shared accountability for speed and reliability. Driving delivery of performance-related improvements and internal tooling, helping
the team focus on the most meaningful user-impacting bottlenecks. Defining and tracking key performance indicators aligned with Canva’s global goals, and communicating progress and insights clearly to cross-functional and senior stakeholders. Contributing to technical design reviews to ensure new features are built with scalability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability in mind. You're probably a match if You have proven experience leading and developing engineering teams in fast-moving, product-focused environments. You bring strong end-to-end systems thinking across frontend, backend, and native engines, particularly in video or other performance-critical applications (e.g., gaming engines, multimedia platforms, OS-level systems). You can translate high-level performance ambitions into clear, actionable engineering roadmaps that drive measurable user impact. You communicate complex technical topics in a way that builds alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders. You balance long-term architectural quality with pragmatic delivery, always grounding performance work in user experience outcomes. You are comfortable using telemetry, experimentation, and A/B testing to evaluate and validate the impact of technical improvements.