Java Software Engineer

Canva, Beijing

Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software

At Canva, our mission is to democratize design and empower creativity and visual expression for every person, on every platform. Since launch in April 2013, our user base has grown exponentially, amassing over 10 million users in over 100 languages, making us one of the world's fastest-growing technology companies. As of today, we've achieved profitability, and the company is valued over $1-billion, which comfortably prepares us for the next phase of growth and development.

Software engineering is the core of who we are at Canva. The Canva code base was built to scale from day one. This has allowed for a unique environment where engineers spend most of their time optimizing performance and releasing new features rather than fixing legacy code. With an adherence to fundamentals and first principles, the team strives to use the most appropriate tools for the tasks at hand, aiming to strike that carefully measured balance between getting things done and long-term maintainability of the code base and supporting infrastructure.

You'll be joining a team of skilled technologists with previous experience at companies such as Google, JetBrains, Yandex, Atlassian, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook; leveraging their knowledge and experience building mass-scale web applications for consumers and businesses alike.

We promote a warm and collaborative work environment by embracing a flat structure where engineers set big goals and are given the tools and support to achieve them. We also invite our engineers to contribute to the direction their peers are taking with proactive pair ups for peer-reviewing of code as well as regular engineering forums for opinions and ideas to be heard. These practices ensure that knowledge is shared and releases are quick and efficient. (For a deeper look into Canva's engineering culture, here's an article by our CTO, Dave, discussing how we get things done.)

Finally - you're probably curious about our technology stack. At a high level, Canva's backend is powered by a set of services (some micro, some not-so-micro) built primarily in Java, hosted on Linux, sitting on AWS. We also sprinkle in some powerful open-source libraries and tools (have a look at finagle), as well as bespoke components to power some of the magic.

Role Responsibilities

You will join Canva as an individual contributor and be paired with a mentor. Your day to day activities will consist of solution design and hands-on software development - working closely with your leads, designers, and product managers to deliver features and functionality to our 10+ million customers all over the world
Once you’ve settled in and have a comfortable grasp of the product, environment, and processes, you'll be given more responsibility and start leveraging your previous experience -- bringing new ideas to the table concerning everything from feature development, process improvement, and product suggestions
Taking charge of your career development by seizing opportunities to work across different teams, technologies, and roles
Developing and iterating on technical proposals - outlining how solutions will be structured and developed
Developing solutions you've designed from the ground up through to deployment into production
Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks within the application and broader infrastructure
Participating in design meetings, hiring interviews, and code reviews
Performance debugging, benchmarking, and building awesome things in general

Required Experience & Skills

Fluent English and Mandarin
Two (2) or more years of commercial experience developing complex web applications
You’re happy to work exclusively in Java (previous experience with other languages is great)
Firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns. You’d be surprised how often these things come up here at Canva!
That you’re happy to roll the sleeves up and dive into java.util.concurrent from time to time :)
Strong communication and collaborative skills, both written and verbal

Benefits

Competitive salary, plus equity options
Flexible working hours, we value work-life balance
Fun and quirky celebrations
Relocation budget for interstate or overseas individuals (see below for visa information)

The Canva workspace is set up for you to do your best work and have a great time doing so, with breakout areas, little nooks, and quiet places to retreat.

Want to experience Canva for yourself?

Check out what life is like at Canva on Instagram.

Check out what our users are saying about us on Twitter.

Learn how we work from Dave, our CTO

Get to know our Chef, Chris

Meet our CEO, Melanie

Finally, give Canva a go!

If you're seeking professional growth and enjoy working on large, distributed, cloud-based applications that delight our millions of individual and business users alike - then apply now to be considered for the position!

If you require visa sponsorship, you must ensure you have at least two (2) years of post-University commercial experience as a Software Engineer and meet the mandatory sponsorship requirements laid out by Department of Home Affairs.

We will not accept or review any CVs from external recruitment agencies.

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.