Principal Partner Engineer — Ecosystem

Canva • San Francisco, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. This role sits in the Ecosystem supergroup, which owns Canva's external platform surface: MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. The Ecosystem group is approximately 150 engineers (and ~200 people overall) across developer experience, apps, and platform APIs, plus a Solutions group that covers toolkits solutions engineering and Systems Integrators. This role works closely with the Ecosystem leadership team, and partners directly with our Head of Partnerships on flagship partner engagements. The agentic AI ecosystem is being wired together right now, at the platform layer, by a small number of people at a small number of companies. This role is one of the seats at that table on Canva's side. What you help decide in the next twelve months will shape how the world's most-used visual design platform shows up in the world's most-used AI systems for years. If you've been looking for an IC role with real leverage on what gets built, this is it.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience, with several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product.
• Have built developer platforms, not just evangelized them.
• Have 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.
• Do not oversell what's doable, and do not 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.
• Have 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
• 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