Staff Software Engineer - Native Infrastructure

Hey, g'day, 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.

What you'd be doing in this role:

Every native app Canva ships runs on a build and release system someone has to own, and right now that system sits on the critical path for the biggest client-side re-architecture in Canva's history. You'd be the engineer who takes that on: the Bazel rules, the monorepo, the release pipeline, the whole native foundation that hundreds of engineers build against every day.

Canva's mobile apps are moving off a browser-wrapped shell and onto a native-grade Portable Platform, and the build, release and CI foundations underneath that shift currently sit with a handful of people stitching together fragmented tooling. This role exists to give that foundation a single, deliberate owner, someone who can set the technical direction for iOS and Android build systems, the monorepo migration, and the React Native build pipeline that the Portable Platform depends on.

Bazel at mobile scale is still rare in this industry, which means most of the standards you'd set here don't exist yet anywhere else. You'd be defining what "good" looks like for build reliability, release safety and monorepo strategy across both platforms, and you'd be doing it with the benefit of a 12-month horizon rather than the current quarter, the difference between a senior engineer solving a defined problem and a staff engineer defining the problem worth solving.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

Build architecture: own the roadmap for Bazel build rules, React Native bundling and codegen, making trade-offs between short-term fixes and long-term foundations.

Release infrastructure: mature Canva's mobile release and deployment tooling, including OTA and staged rollout, so shipping mobile is predictable rather than fragile.

Monorepo migration: lead the staged migration of mobile repos into Canva's monorepo, owning build, test and release continuity throughout.

CI/CD strategy: set the quality gating strategy across the build pipeline, surfacing reliability and speed problems before they're handed to you.

Cross-platform foundations: evolve the React Native build pipeline into a shared foundation that serves both web and mobile, not just mobile in isolation.

Stakeholder alignment: work across Mobile Workflows, Cross Platform, Build Platform and DevX to pull fragmented tooling into one coherent system.

Team leverage: build monitoring and health signals for builds and releases, and mentor engineers so the standards you set outlast any one project.

Success here looks like build and release infrastructure that other teams stop noticing because it just works, and a mobile monorepo strategy that product teams build against without having to think about the plumbing underneath it.

You’re probably a match:

We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.

Experience:

Build systems: deep, hands-on expertise with Bazel, Gradle, or Xcode build systems at production scale.

Cross-team delivery: a track record of scoping and delivering complex projects that span multiple teams — migrations, monorepo consolidation, or build infrastructure at scale.

Mobile depth: strong native engineering background in iOS, Android, or both, with a real point of view on where cross-platform tooling helps and where it doesn't.

Release engineering: experience owning CI/CD or release pipelines that other teams depend on, not just contributing to them.

Strategic judgement: you balance short-term delivery against long-term architecture, and you can connect an external shift in tooling to a change in technical direction.

Standards setting: your documentation and technical practices have become the reference other engineers build on, not just something you wrote once.