Principal Partner Engineer, Ecosystem

Canva • San Francisco, CA

13h • Hybrid

About The Position

This role is for a Principal Partner Engineer within Canva's Ecosystem team, which is central to how the world's agentic AI systems integrate with visual design. The position involves working with major AI platforms like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, influencing the engineering layer of these integrations. The successful candidate will drive technical decisions and alignment between partners and Canva's engineering teams, setting the technical direction for Canva's external platform surface. This includes grounding partner conversations in working code, driving product-line engineering across various external platform surfaces (MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, middleware PaaS), and proactively communicating platform direction to partners. The role also involves leading technical relationships for strategic partner and customer engagements, balancing product roadmaps, API design, and partnership alignment. It's described as a high-leverage individual contributor role that will significantly shape how Canva's platform interacts with leading AI systems for years to come. The Ecosystem supergroup, where this role sits, owns Canva's external platform surface and comprises approximately 150 engineers.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product.
• Built developer platforms, not just evangelised them.
• Shipped code in production on platforms used by external developers.
• Move fluidly between a product roadmap conversation, a system design discussion, and a partner negotiation, and you bring each one forward.
• Bring a prototype or sample code to a hard conversation.
• Don't oversell what's doable, and you don't overbuild what isn't needed.
• Technically deep on the modern AI platform stack.
• Have real opinions on MCP, tool-use, agentic API design, and the tradeoffs between them.
• Communicate directly.
• Resolve misalignments by writing clearly.
• Worked inside product stacks that are heterogeneous and move fast.
• Know how to orient yourself quickly in a codebase you didn't write.
• Raise the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering by sharing knowledge, feedback and bringing others into partner facing wins.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience shipping or integrating with MCP (Anthropic, OpenAI, Copilot, or Gemini flavours).
• Strong TypeScript, comfortable across front-end (React) and server-side JavaScript, and the ability to read a Java backend even if you don't want to write one.
• A track record of turning ambiguous partner signal into crisp engineering decisions that Product and Engineering acted on.

Responsibilities

• Drive decisions and alignment across Partners and Canva engineering.
• Set technical direction for Canva's external platform surface.
• Ground partner conversations in working code.
• Drive product-line engineering across our external platform surfaces.
• Carry the platform direction outward early.
• Shape strategic partner and customer engagements.

Benefits

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed