Staff Front End Engineer

About the role

Welcome to the Staff Front End Engineer role at Canva where you join the team actively redefining how the world experiences design. We appreciate your interest and know that searching for a role takes time and careful consideration. This overview presents what you can expect if you choose to join us, without unnecessary delay or ambiguity. What you will own is substantial, including the architecture and direction of our cross-runtime frontend platform. You will be responsible for designing abstractions that allow engineers to write once and run seamlessly across web, iOS, and Android. Your decisions will shape the defaults for thousands of engineers within the organisation. You will work in close collaboration with Principal Engineers and mobile implementation specialists to ensure alignment between vision and execution. Within your first year, you will see the frontend layer of the Portable Platform built, adopted, and actively used in production. This role is for someone who thrives on ownership, clarity, and hands-on delivery at scale.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect the frontend layer of the Portable Platform, designing clean abstractions that let React engineers write product code without ever thinking about the target runtime.
• Lead the extraction of the React Web codebase toward a React Web plus React Native environment, ensuring the transition sets a long-term standard for the organisation.
• Own the web implementations of shared Portable Platform components, delivering the web runtime portion of the cross-runtime contract.
• Upskill hundreds of frontend engineers by establishing clear code standards, documentation, design reviews, and direct collaboration that bridges mental models.
• Reason about and integrate Server-side Rendering and React Server Components into the portable frontend story where they connect meaningfully to the backend.
• Write code day-to-day as a Staff engineer, creating design documents, committing to production, and ensuring architecture decisions translate into working software.
• Define patterns that become the default approach for cross-runtime component development across web and native.
• Partner with product teams to ensure that abstractions solve real-world problems without adding unnecessary complexity.
• Measure and drive frontend performance with rigor, distinguishing meaningful improvements from misleading benchmarks.
• Act as a cross-team influence, changing how multiple groups build through documentation, prototypes, and deep technical conversations.
• Ensure that runtime concerns remain in the platform and never leak into product code, keeping the developer experience clean.
• Provide clear migration paths and tooling that make it safe for hundreds of engineers to adopt new runtime targets.
• Contribute to open-source ecosystems where it strengthens the abstractions used by Canva's frontend platform.
• Evaluate emerging patterns in frontend tooling and assess their impact on the long-term portability strategy.

Requirements

• You understand React at depth, including reconciliation, the rendering model, and the server component model, and have made decisions below the framework's surface.
• You have driven measurable performance gains on a complex frontend product and know how to distinguish a real win from a misleading benchmark.
• You have worked on a codebase that runs across more than one runtime and understand the trade-offs of abstracting at the component layer.
• You understand how React Native differs from React Web and how engineers must think differently when targeting both web and native.
• You have shipped something that changed how more than one team builds, through documentation, prototypes, and direct conversation.
• You write code day-to-day, with recent commits, recent design docs, and recent reviews demonstrating active contribution.
• You have used AI tooling in real engineering work and have a view on how it changes frontend development.
• You are comfortable reasoning about server-side rendering and React Server Components in the context of a portable frontend layer.

Nice to have

• Hands-on React Native experience, even at a surface level, with evidence of shipping something in React Native.
• Contributions to open-source projects related to React, React Native, or the broader frontend ecosystem.
• Deep experience building design systems or component libraries that are consumed by multiple teams across different rendering environments.

Practical notes

This role is based in Perth, Australia, and is a full-time engagement. We are unable to sponsor visas for this position, and candidates must already have the right to work in Australia. Relocation support is not available for this role. The successful candidate is expected to work from the Perth office.