Backend Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer (Java) - AI Media Transforms (m/f/x)
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Job Description
Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
Servus, 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, Australia but Austria is home to part of our European operations. And you have 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.
Fun fact, a big part of our Austrian operations is developing the AI product within Canva to help reimagine how artificial intelligence can be used in design. Pretty cool ha!
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
- Own the backend of the service that every AI editing feature at Canva calls. It's a Java service that sits between Canva's product surfaces and our GPU model workers, and it turns "remove this background" into a durable, observable, safe job. You'll own API and proto design, the job and task state machine, multi-step pipelines, queue-driven worker orchestration, persistence, content safety and moderation, and the error handling that makes a multi-second GPU-backed request feel reliable. The models are built by our ML engineers and research partners; you own everything around them.
- Ship new editing capabilities end to end. When a new model is ready (e.g., inpainting, upscaling, background removal, and several more each year) you design the API, build the pipeline, wire up the async handoff to the GPU worker, and roll it out behind feature flags with metrics from day one.
- Run it in production. You'll be on call for a service doing GPU-backed work at Canva scale, and you'll own what that requires: autoscaling driven by queue depth, GPU capacity and instance-type choices, replica floors and warm pools for latency-sensitive models, health probes, region rollouts, release schedules and deploy tests, plus the dashboards you'll wish you had at 2am.
- Make it faster and cheaper. Profile the whole request path including queue wait, media fetch, pre- and post-processing, GPU time, moderation, S3 upload and ship improvements to both latency and cost per request. Most of the wins here are in Java, orchestration and capacity, not in the model.
- Build the platform other teams build on. Several internal services and product surfaces call these APIs, from Canva AI and Design Agent to the editor, and the photo editor. You'll design contracts that survive constant model churn: backwards-compatible proto evolution, sensible defaults, completion and notification semantics callers can rely on, and requirements like content provenance, privacy preferences and data-eligibility checks built into the pipeline rather than bolted on later.
- Set backend direction and raise the bar. You'll act as the backend tech lead for the team, shaping architecture and design reviews alongside the team's ML tech lead, and raising backend craft across a team of both backend and ML engineers.
- Partner across teams. Product teams on requirements, our research partners on new models, the inference team on GPU serving, and consumer teams on landing new capabilities on the platform.
You're probably a match if
- You have significant commercial experience designing, building and operating backend systems in production — and staying on call for them.
- You have high proficiency in Java or a similar JVM language (Kotlin, Scala), with a solid grasp of the surrounding ecosystem and tooling.
- You have strong computer science fundamentals such as concurrency, distributed systems, performance engineering, and the design patterns that come with running services at scale.
- You've built asynchronous, job-based systems: queues, workers, state machines, retries, timeouts and partial failure. Our requests take seconds rather than milliseconds, run on scarce GPU capacity and cost real money per call, so correctness under partial failure and cost per request matter more here than raw throughput.
- You're happy owning the operational surface as part of the job: metrics and dashboards, autoscaling and capacity, deployment configuration, and progressive rollout behind feature flags.
- You have taste in API design, and the discipline to evolve a contract without breaking two dozen downstream callers.
- You're comfortable working alongside ML engineers and researchers. You'll write some Python (e.g., worker entry points, job handlers, deployment config) and you should be happy reasoning about a GPU-backed workload as a latency, capacity and cost problem. You don't need PyTorch, model architecture or training experience; that's our ML engineers' craft and we won't test you on it.
- You have a track record of leading technical initiatives end to end. This means driving architecture decisions, partnering with senior engineers, and raising the technical bar on a team.
- You communicate clearly in writing and verbally, with the ability to make complex technical trade-offs understandable to product, ML and infrastructure audiences alike.
About The Team
The Transforms team sits inside AI Media, in the Generative Foundations group. Our mission is world-class AI editing as a platform capability. This concerns the generative side of editing media people already have, rather than generating from scratch. In practice, that means we run the service that turns editing models into APIs the rest of Canva can call, and several services and surfaces already do.
We partner closely with the Photo AI group (who own product and model selection), CORE (model research) and Inference (GPU serving). We're a small, senior team based in Vienna, recently formed from Canva's Photo AI engineers, and a deliberate mix of backend and ML engineers — this is one of the backend seats.
What's in it for you?
Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.
Here's a Taste Of What's On Offer
- 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
Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.
At Canva we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience and our overall assessment of what we observed and learnt in the hiring process. The starting salary for this position is EUR 80,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.
Other Stuff To Know
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.
We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!
Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.
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