Staff Front-End Engineer - Telemetry

Job Description

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. 

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.

Every decision Canva makes about its product gets better when the people building it can actually see what's happening. Frontend Telemetry is the layer that makes that possible. Every click, every interaction, every page that loads, the data captured here is what tells the company whether the product is working, where it's slow, where users are getting stuck, and where the next bet should go. Hundreds of engineers across Canva depend on what this team ships. The decisions made on top of it shape the product.

The strategic bet is a new telemetry SDK that gives every developer at Canva one consistent way to measure performance and reliability connected to user interactions. The aspiration is high: an SDK so well-designed that, in many cases, developers don't need to instrument anything at all. The data is just there. That's the ceiling this role is reaching for, and getting there means rethinking how instrumentation works from the ground up.

There's a second reason this work matters now, and it's the part of the role that's genuinely new. AI-driven experiences bypass the traditional frontend. There's no click, no rendered UI to measure, no familiar interaction pattern to instrument. There's no settled playbook for measuring it yet, and the engineer in this seat will help shape one. Telemetry for AI-native experiences is frontier work, and that's the part of the brief that's hardest to find anywhere else.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Building the SDK developers love: Easy to instrument, easy to reason about, easy to extend. The bar is an SDK so well-designed that, in many cases, instrumentation happens automatically and developers don't have to think about it. Get this right and every product team at Canva gets faster.

• Going deep into the browser stack: This is where the work earns its level. Performance APIs, the rendering pipeline, the network layer, the way the browser actually executes code. The candidates who land this role are the ones who think at that layer naturally.

• Defining how Canva measures AI: AI-driven experiences interact with users in ways traditional frontend telemetry doesn't capture. There's no playbook for this. The engineer in this seat shapes what good looks like.

• Owning the telemetry SDK direction: Set the architecture, the patterns, the path from where measurement is today to where it needs to be. Set the direction that helps other teams build. Rally the product teams behind the solutions.

• Leading with code, not whiteboards: Canva doesn't have an architecture function — Staff engineers stay hands-on. You'll live in the code, build the SDK, and push commits.

• Driving adoption across the product: Every product team at Canva eventually moves onto this SDK. That's a technical problem and an organisational one. You'll need the credibility to bring teams along, not the authority to mandate.

• Sparring with strong peers: The team is cross-functional by design — frontend, backend, data science, analytics engineering. The technical debate is rich, fast, and substantive. Bring strong opinions, change your mind when better evidence shows up.

• What success looks like: Every product team at Canva has the visibility they need to find and fix performance and reliability problems in their own code. The SDK is the default — adopted broadly, easy to reason about, deep enough to cover what matters. The patterns set by this role become the standard way Canva measures the frontend, including the way AI-native experiences are measured.

You're probably a match if

We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.

Experience

• Telemetry at scale: Built or significantly evolved a frontend telemetry, observability, or instrumentation system in production. The kind of problem you only seriously tackle once a company is big enough to feel the cost of not having it.

• Browser stack depth: You operate naturally at the browser layer. Performance APIs, the rendering pipeline, the network layer, the way the browser actually executes your code. This is the differentiator for the role.

• Frontier instincts: You've worked on problems where the established playbook doesn't fully apply. Maybe that was scale, maybe a new technology, maybe a domain that hadn't been measured before. You're comfortable shaping the answer rather than looking it up.

• Staff altitude: You've been operating where both the problem and the solution are unknown. You walk into ambiguous work saying "this is the shape of the problem, this is what I think we should do, here's where we'll experiment."

• Cross-team influence: Built tooling that other teams have adopted at scale. You know how to ship something engineers actually want to use, and how to bring them along when they don't.

• AI fluency: Used agents in real work. Have a view on what changes for frontend engineering when AI is a daily part of the workflow.

Technical knowledge

• React and TypeScript: Production depth in Canva's frontend stack

• MobX or equivalent: State management at scale in a large frontend application

• Browser internals: Performance APIs, rendering, network, the layers underneath the framework

• Frontend observability: Tracing, metrics, real user monitoring patterns

• SDK design: Library API design that makes adoption easy for the engineers consuming it

• Data-warehouse fluency: Enough to understand how captured telemetry flows downstream into analytics

• Deep fundamentals: Engineering fundamentals from a CS background, including data structures, complexity, the hard parts

Nice to have

• React Native: Production experience, or a credible path into the native side of the mobile bridge

• Observability vendors: Worked with or alongside Datadog, Honeycomb, Sentry, or similar in production

• AI instrumentation: Experience measuring AI-driven experiences where traditional frontend telemetry doesn't cover the full picture

About the Group

Join Product Insights Enablement (PIE) at Canva, where our mission is to give every product team the data they need to make better decisions. We build the internal platform that powers feature analytics, A/B testing, feature flagging, rollout insights, and the telemetry layer that captures how users interact with Canva. Every product team builds on top of what this group ships.

We’re responsible for capturing the telemetry that powers everything else in our platform and leverage it through gating process like A/B testing to ensure the quality of our product doesn’t degrade over time. One thing makes us different from equivalent work at most other companies: Canva runs a single monorepo, which means the SDK gets adopted one way across the whole company, not five forks per team. The work compounds quite fast once it reaches critical mass.

Every product team at Canva benefits when the telemetry layer gets better. And the patterns set here shape how the company makes decisions for years to come.

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 stack 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.

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.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.