# Staff Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only) at Canva

- Company: Canva
- What the company does: Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte! Thanks for stopping by. Backed by Bessemer, General Catalyst and 500 Global.
- Company website: https://www.canva.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $262K to $329K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-15
- Apply by: 2026-10-30
- Apply: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Canva/6000000001409036
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/canva-staff-software-engineer-video-performance-bay-area-only/

## About the role

Video is the most resource-hungry thing Canva does. Every layer of it costs something: the browser, the phone in someone's hand, the native engine underneath, on-device ML, and the backend pipelines behind all of it. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Video Performance team, you'll own how fast all of that actually feels.

## What they're looking for

- Define the performance metrics and service level objectives for Video, and make sure they track what people actually notice rather than what happens to be easy to measure
- You count every millisecond, byte and milliamp, and you've made real systems measurably faster. You can talk through the numbers
- You understand concurrency, memory behaviour and CPU and GPU cost models well enough to explain why something is slow, not only where
- You have a working understanding of video pipelines: playback, codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking and composition. Or the appetite to pick it up quickly
- You prioritise by user impact, starting with the journeys people use most on the devices that struggle most, and you can influence engineering teams you don't own, across time zones, to get that work landed