Principal Software Engineer - Mobile Platform

Role overview

What you will do

• Set technical direction for the hybrid mobile platform across React Native, iOS, and Android.
• Turn the architecture into production code with performance, reliability, and observability foundations.
• Deliver a React Native surface in production supported by stable platform primitives.
• Lead Staff and Senior engineers through the mobile architecture migration.
• Scale platform adoption across major product teams and influence mobile architecture across Canva.

Experience

• Experience building or significantly evolving a large-scale cross-platform mobile architecture in production.
• Experience leading migration of a mature mobile product while it remained live and growing.
• Principal-level technical leadership across multiple teams and senior engineering groups.
• Organization-wide influence through platforms, standards, or technical direction.
• Hands-on technical depth and comfort with difficult implementation details.
• Ability to reason from first principles, challenge assumptions, and exercise engineering judgment.

Technical knowledge

• Knowledge of shared-code runtimes, native boundaries, bundle delivery, and device performance profiling.
• Deep fundamentals across both iOS and Android, including limits of shared abstractions.
• Knowledge of mobile performance, reliability, crash monitoring, and optimization at scale.
• Knowledge of shared capabilities, libraries, abstractions, and infrastructure used across engineering teams.
• Strong engineering fundamentals including data structures, complexity, and system-level trade-offs.

Nice to have

• Deep production experience with React Native and React internals.
• Rust or C/C++ experience for portable mobile libraries.
• Open-source contributions to React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Expo, or related ecosystems.
• Experience with mobile CI/CD, release trains, and over-the-air updates at scale.
• Experience using AI tooling in engineering work.

About the team

Benefits

• Equity packages are offered to align employee success with company success.
• Benefits include inclusive parental leave, a wellbeing and connection allowance, and flexible leave options.

Application notes

• Interviews are conducted virtually.
• Applicants are asked to provide pronouns and any reasonable interview adjustments they may need.