Principal Partner Engineer — Ecosystem

You have 10+ years of experience, with several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product.

You've built developer platforms, not just evangelised them. You've shipped code in production on platforms used by external developers.

You move fluidly between a product roadmap conversation, a system design discussion, and a partner negotiation, and you bring each one forward.

You bring a prototype or sample code to a hard conversation. You don't oversell what's doable, and you don't overbuild what isn't needed.

You're technically deep on the modern AI platform stack. You have real opinions on MCP, tool-use, agentic API design, and the tradeoffs between them.

You communicate directly. You resolve misalignments by writing clearly.

You've worked inside product stacks that are heterogeneous and move fast. You know how to orient yourself quickly in a codebase you didn't write.

You raise the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering by sharing knowledge, feedback and bringing others into partner facing wins.

It would be great if you also had

Hands-on experience shipping or integrating with MCP (Anthropic, OpenAI, Copilot, or Gemini flavours).

Strong TypeScript, comfortable across front-end (React) and server-side JavaScript, and the ability to read a Java backend even if you don't want to write one.

A track record of turning ambiguous partner signal into crisp engineering decisions that Product and Engineering acted on.

The agentic AI ecosystem is being wired together right now, at the platform layer, by a small number of people at a small number of companies. This role is one of the seats at that table on Canva's side. What you help decide in the next twelve months will shape how the world's most-used visual design platform shows up in the world's most-used AI systems for years. If you've been looking for an IC role with real leverage on what gets built, this is it.

This role sits in the Ecosystem supergroup. Ecosystem owns Canva's external platform surface: MCP, REST APIs, Apps-in-Canva, and the middleware PaaS. Ecosystem is ~150 engineers (and ~200 people overall) across developer experience, apps, and platform APIs, plus a Solutions group that covers toolkits solutions engineering and Systems Integrators. This role works closely with the Ecosystem leadership team, and partners directly with our Head of Partnerships on flagship partner engagements.

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.

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.