Senior Software Engineer - Video Performance - (Bay area only)

Canva • San Francisco, CA

1d • $262,000 - $329,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. This role will involve owning performance across the whole video creation lifecycle, from template load to export, on web, iOS, and Android. The engineer will define performance metrics, build telemetry and tracing, and develop profiling and benchmarking tools. The goal is to ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory, and battery life, often by working with native engines, shaders, and ML pipelines. Collaboration with Native Video Engine, on-device ML, and Editing teams is key to optimizing hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration, and asynchronous processing.

Requirements

• C++, or another systems language such as Rust, used to optimise critical paths in a native engine.
• Experience with graphics APIs (OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, WebGPU) and their effect on frame times.
• Proven ability to make real systems measurably faster and discuss the results.
• Ability to work across product code, backend services, and native or platform layers, and adapt to unfamiliar stacks.
• Experience building performance tooling that other engineers rely on (profilers, tracing and instrumentation, benchmarking harnesses, regression suites or telemetry pipelines).
• Proficiency with tools like Perf, Instruments, Perfetto, Android Studio Profiler, and Chrome DevTools, and willingness to build custom tools.
• Ability to define meaningful metrics, read telemetry at scale, spot regressions, and prove optimizations.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, memory behavior, and CPU/GPU cost models.
• Ability to prioritize by user impact, focusing on high-usage journeys and struggling devices.
• Skill in getting performance work implemented by teams without direct management.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on iOS or Android work focused on system-level performance (responsiveness, startup time, memory, battery, thermal behavior), especially with older Android devices.
• Working understanding of video pipelines (codecs, container formats, frame-accurate seeking and composition).
• On-device ML performance work (tuning inference latency with CoreML, TFLite, or TensorRT).
• WebAssembly performance tuning for heavy compute in the browser.
• Contributions to open-source multimedia or graphics projects (e.g., FFmpeg, Chromium).

Responsibilities

• Own performance across the whole video creation lifecycle: template load, media import, timeline scrubbing, real-time preview, effects and export, on web, iOS and Android.
• 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.
• Build the telemetry, tracing, dashboards and alerting that keep video performance visible, including regression detection that catches problems before users feel them.
• Build the profiling and benchmarking tooling: traces, device labs, automated performance suites.
• Ship measurable improvements to latency, frame stability, memory and battery life.
• Work with the Native Video Engine, on-device ML and Editing teams to rework hot paths for better parallelism, caching, hardware acceleration and asynchronous processing.

Benefits

• Equity packages
• Health benefit plans
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• Inclusive parental leave policy
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance
• Flexible leave options

What This Job Offers

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