Senior Program Manager, Canva Foundation

Job Description

This is a 12 month fixed-term contract, with a start date in September/October 2026 to cover parental leave.

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 Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect.

This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

About the Canva Foundation Group

Canva Foundation Group is Canva's social impact centre of excellence, and one of the biggest contributing teams to Canva's Two-Step Plan: (1) Build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and (2) Do the most good we can. We're the team that helps the rest of Canva get consistently good at social impact, and we run the programs where impact is the mission, not just a component.

Our role in Canva has two sides:

1. We lift the standard across Canva, setting best practice for social impact, building reusable frameworks, and supporting any team that wants to do impact work well.

2. We lead the work that needs us most such as social impact programs, Canvanaut Force for Good participation, philanthropic partnerships, and cross-functional Step Two coordination

We're a lean, globally distributed team across Sydney, Melbourne, Manila, Austin and London. The team is fast-moving and impact-obsessed, and we value people who build structure out of ambiguity and care about outcomes over output.

About the Role

ANZ is Canva's biggest region for Canvanaut engagement, and home to our largest portfolio of local social impact programs.

You'll start as our ANZ Programs Lead, owning how Force for Good (Canvanaut Volunteering) shows up across the region: from generalist volunteering to skilled, specialty-led impact work. From November 2026, your scope grows as you'll step up to also hold the global delivery rhythm too, working across our regional teams in the US, EMEA and SEA.

This is a 12 month fixed-term contract, with a start date in September/October 2026 to cover parental leave.

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.

• Own and run the ANZ Canvanaut engagement strategy end-to-end for Foundation Owned Programs.

• Be the SME point of contact for volunteering and Step Two engagement in ANZ. Triaging requests from teams and nonprofit partners, guiding Specialty and Supergroup Leads through running their own Force for Good moments, and unblocking issues on the ground.

• Deliver the high-visibility moments, flagship skilled volunteering events, regional Show and Tells, the moments where Step Two is most felt across the region.

• Spot friction in how engagement runs and fix it: proposing new playbooks, templates and AI-assisted workflows, and testing them in the field before they become the standard.

• From November 2026, you’ll also run the global delivery rhythm: regular check-ins with the Regional Leads (US, EMEA, SEA), reviewing progress against the strategic framework and helping them solve what's in their way.

• Keep watch across all regions: monitoring delivery, spotting risks and blockers early, and context-switching between hands-on ANZ delivery and cross-region oversight.

• Deliver our global reporting and impact measurement cadence with our Impact Lead, and partner with our Head of Social Impact on wider enablement work.

• Work autonomously across both remits, knowing what to decide, what to park, and what to escalate to the Head of Social Impact.

You're probably a match if you

• Have extensive program management experience in social impact, ideally within software/tech sectors.

• Demonstrated experience designing and running engagement or volunteering programs at scale for large, distributed audiences.

• Strong programmatic and operational skills, turning a set strategy into plans, rhythms and delivery across multiple teams or regions.

• A systems builder who creates repeatable processes and is keen to use AI-assisted workflows to scale impact rather than hours.

• Strong communication skills across multiple formats, including public speaking with confidence and energy.

• A natural relationship-builder who gets things done through other teams without direct authority, and can support and guide senior regional peers with credibility.

• Genuine motivation for social impact work, and for what Canva's Two-Step Plan is trying to achieve.

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.

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.

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.