Staff Engineer (one level above Senior - Backend) - App Experiences, Ecosystem

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte! Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. Where and how you can work Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have a choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals. What you’d be doing in this role As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve. At the moment, this role is focused on: Design and build the App Access Policy service — the new backend that governs how organisations and brands control app access across Canva, using a DynamoDB + SpiceDB architecture to handle high-throughput policy evaluation at scale. Evolve the App Search and App Installation services — our core discovery and installation infrastructure — improving data models, payload efficiency, and reliability to support faster experimentation across all App surfaces in Canva. Drive the shift from a front-end-heavy architecture to a platform model: move ranking, recommendations, filtering, and governance logic from the front-end into well-defined backend services that any surface team can consume with confidence. Contribute to semantic search and recommendations by working with ElasticSearch and vector databases (Qdrant) to deliver more personalised, context-aware App discovery — helping us move from fetching all apps and filtering them client-side to intelligent, intent-aware recommendations. Partner with front-end engineers and product teams to design clean, minimal data interfaces that reduce payload sizes, improve load times, and unblock teams building App surfaces across Canva — including in the logged-out marketplace. Play a hands-on role in technical decision-making — writing design docs, running DACIs, and setting the engineering direction for new services and migrations that will underpin App Experiences for years to come. You're probably a match if You're a strong backend engineer with deep Java experience — you're comfortable designing and operating high-throughput services in production and you care about reliability, observability, and getting things right at scale. You have hands-on experience with DynamoDB — you understand access patterns, know how to model data to avoid hot partitions, and have shipped production systems that depend on it. You've worked with access control systems or authorisation infrastructure — ideally with SpiceDB, Zanzibar-style models, or similar policy evaluation systems, and you understand the tradeoffs between relational and graph-based approaches to permission modelling. You're fluent in search and data infrastructure — you've worked with ElasticSearch in production, and ideally have experience with vector databases (Qdrant, Pinecone, or similar) for semantic search or recommendations. You think in platforms, not features — you naturally gravitate toward building shared primitives, clean service boundaries, and data contracts that let other teams move faster rather than adding to the surface-level pile. You have a track record of reducing complexity — you've migrated legacy systems, cleaned up technical debt, and made architectural improvements that compounded over time, not just shipped new things. You enjoy working in a collaborative, cross-functional team — you're comfortable contributing to product and design conversations, writing docs that build alignment, and mentoring less experienced engineers along the way. About the team We're App Experiences, the team responsible for how every Canva user discovers, adop ... (truncated, view full listing at source)