Frontend Web Engineer

Canva, Sydney

Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software

At Canva, we’re transforming the way the world designs. Our mission is to make beautiful design possible for everyone. But making design simple is not easy and we need to continue to build a world-class team to pursue the many huge opportunities in front of us. So if you want to play a key role in one of the world’s fastest growing startups, this job could be for you.

We take great pride in designing a product and a brand that users really love. Just check out our Twitter stream. Your colleagues at Canva — like you — enjoy being the best at their craft and coming together as a team to create something world-class.

Your engineering journey with Canva

Code Contribution

Every engineer at Canva takes responsibility over their own code - no matter how small those code changes may be. We write our code with readability, reusability, testability, and maintainability in mind by following industry best practices. Everyone gets to contribute progressively to more complex areas of the codebase while encouraging to keep our code simple, and our technology choices viable. The team’s code contribution helps us look to the future of Canva engineering and what systems, resources, and technology we need in place to achieve our goals.

Effectiveness

Every member of the team understands how their work relates to overall objectives and deliverables. Equipped with broad knowledge of the team’s code and services, you will be empowered to make data driven decisions on issues that will also help us create long term technical roadmaps. This is highly significant on both company goals and to the wider engineering community (contributions to open source, presenting at external forums, etc).

Technical Design

As a Canva engineer, you will understand the broad strokes of how our system fits together by knowing what teams are responsible for each piece of functionality and use this when crafting a technical design--keeping in mind the impact of your design on other parts of the system. Designs should be pragmatic and simple.

Communication

Communication plays a vital role in making all of our goals and deliverables a reality. Ask for help when needed and ask pertinent questions to clarify others’ points of view. Effectively communicating issues allows us to unblock them right away and share results to the larger group to improve engineering across Canva. Everyone is empowered to drive conversations within the team to help navigate technical issues.

The Team

The Web Engineering Team drives all development, maintenance, and optimization of Canva's high volume web portals from a customer-facing angle. Our team is revolving rapidly and rewriting our stack to employ top notch technologies both in the frontend and backend across all web properties. They work in conjunction with many other teams at Canva (Product, Marketing, Growth, Internationalization, etc).

Check out some of the Web Engineering Team's projects:

Wiki colors

Learn - a collection articles showcasing design best practices and tips!

Hundreds of Landing pages that are getting millions of views a month that bring over 50k sign-ups a day.

Marketing pages for products and feature launches: Canva for work, iPhone, iPad, Canva Embeds, etc

Company pages such as about us, careers (the one you’re viewing this ad on)

Our own custom Help centre

Some fun SEO driven projects: Photo editor, Color palette generator and Font combinations.

Your impact to the team

You will help bring ideas to life, working closely with designers and backenders within the team. Your role will be to implement all these new features and pages as well as optimising and maintaining the existing ones. Canva strives for good design and we value a lot the attention to detail. From the nicest hover effect or the slightest shadow to the smoothest animations. In this role, not only will you employ best practices in web development - you will also have tangible impact across the business while working with designers, business stakeholders, and other engineers to ensure we're creating, developing and continuing to deliver the rich web experience our users have come to know and love.

About the candidate

We are looking for a front-end engineer who can work with designers and backenders and build creative and usable experiences. An understanding that spans across digital design and web technologies is key to this. Importantly this role requires a front-end developer who has a great level of competence around HTML/CSS and Javascript. Having background knowledge in Typescript/React/NodeJS/PHP/Wordpress is a bonus. If you love taking crisp and creative designs and creating super tight code and beautiful interactions then we’re the place for you.

What you'll do

Develop new user-facing features, creative solutions for Canva’s marketing campaigns, landing pages, new product teasers, and a wide range of other projects.
Identify and communicate best practices for front end engineering within the team.
Interact with our back end systems.
Build reusable code and libraries for future use.
Improve existing code base, architecture and workflow.
Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs.
Optimize application for maximum speed and scalability.
Ensure that the Canva experience spans a wide range of devices, from desktop to mobile.
Makes suggestions and participates in moving the company forward as being an expert in what they do.
Communicate with other team members to determine the best solutions to difficult problems.

You'll love this role if you have

Working knowledge of Native JS and flexibility to work with various frameworks
Expert knowledge of web technologies (HTML5/CSS3/JS)
Good understanding of different ECMA versions and their differences
Have an outstanding understanding of Critical Rendering Path
Experience building and managing WordPress themes and the WordPress environment.
Understanding of at least the basics of NodeJS and its concept
The ability to write good object oriented JS
Have a decent notion of PHP, or another full stack environment, to integrate FE elements with it
Understanding of React / Typescript would be a bonus
Intimate knowledge of cross-browser and cross-device development.
Ability to write high-performance, reusable code for UI components, including appropriate testing.
Experience with front end tooling (Webpack, PostCSS, NPM/Yarn, SASS, Gulp)
Experience with build and management tools (Git)
Ability to collaborate with designers to rapidly prototype ideas
Minimum 3-5+ years of experience in front-end development.
The ability to clearly convey thoughts and ideas; both verbal and written.
BS or MS degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering or a related field

What you'll learn at Canva

Server-Side Rendering with React Architecture and development across a range of services from web server to backend API & DB using NodeJS & GraphQL
Working with small to medium teams from all areas of Canva to fulfill fast-moving, ambitious company projects.
A variety of CI tools for managing PRs, regressions and visual regression.
And more!

Benefits

Equity options
Opportunity to join one of the world’s fastest growing tech companies.
Your work will impact millions of Canva’s global users.
Learn from and work with some of Australia’s best talent, including Canva’s founders, engineers, product and growth professionals.
Perks including free breakfast and lunch meals prepared by our in-house chefs.
Fitness & gym benefits
Sponsored team events
Professional education leave & allowance benefits for use on courses, conferences, workshops, books, etc.

Being a force for good

One of our core values at Canva, “Being a force for good” means we are actively working towards a world that isn’t just good for a small few, but one that’s good for everyone. We believe deeply that bringing together diversity of thoughts, perspectives and expression is key for building the best product for our equally diverse community. To achieve this, we need to constantly work towards making Canva the best place to work for everyone.

About Canva

About us At Canva, we create tools that empower the world to design. Our platform combines a drag-and-drop design tool with a stock library of over 1 million photographs, illustrations and imagery. You can also choose from hundreds of professional templates to create social media graphics, presentations, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more. Our mission is to make design simple for everyone. Driven by a team of talented thinkers, an amazing culture and remarkable growth trajectory – we’re out to change the world, one design at a time.