Senior Backend Engineer (Java) - AI Media Transforms (m/f/x)

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:

• Build and operate the AI editing serving stack. Own the backend services that run inpainting, outpainting, upscaling, background removal, and the next generation of editing capabilities — from API design and pipeline implementation, through the async worker / ML-worker handoff and GPU-backed inference, to production monitoring.

• Productionise model work from research. Partner with CORE and Photo AI to take research-grade editing models and turn them into well-tested, observable, cost-aware capabilities. Write the pipelines, evals, and rollout patterns that make this repeatable.

• Design the shared building blocks. Build the reusable libraries (upscaler, outpainting, depth estimation, segmentation, BG removal) that other Canva teams compose into their own AI features, so we solve each problem once.

• Drive inference performance and cost. Identify bottlenecks across the editing stack — GPU utilisation, pre/post-processing around GPU steps, batching, streaming, request routing — and ship improvements that move both latency and $/request.

• Partner across teams. Work closely with Photo AI on product requirements, CORE on model research, Inference on GPU serving, and consumer teams (Canva AI, Design Agent, graphics surfaces) on landing editing capabilities on IGS.

• Raise the bar on the team. Set technical direction together with the team's ML tech lead, and act as the backend tech lead for the team, contribute to architecture and design reviews, mentor MLEs and BEs on backend craft, and participate in the on-call rotation.

You're probably a match if

• You have significant commercial experience designing, building, and operating high-performance, high-throughput backend systems in production.

• You have high proficiency in Java or a similar JVM language (Kotlin, Scala), with a solid grasp of the surrounding ecosystem.

• You have strong computer science fundamentals — concurrency, distributed systems, performance engineering, and the design patterns that come with running services at scale.

• You're comfortable working alongside ML engineers and researchers. You don't need to train models, but you should be able to read PyTorch, reason about GPU memory and inference latency, and have opinions about how models should be served.

• You have a track record of leading technical initiatives end-to-end — 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 infra audiences alike.

About the team

The Transforms team sits inside AI Media in the Generative Experience group. The team’s mission is world-class AI editing as a platform capability — the generative side of editing existing media, rather than generating from scratch. We partner closely with the Photo AI group (who own product and model selection), CORE (model research), and Inference (GPU serving), and we land everything on a shared platform so other Canva teams can reuse what we build. We're a small, senior team based in Vienna, recently formed from Canva's Photo AI engineers.

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.