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

Make it faster and cheaper. Profile the whole request path including queue wait, media fetch, pre- and post-processing, GPU time, moderation, S3 upload and ship improvements to both latency and cost per request. Most of the wins here are in Java, orchestration and capacity, not in the model.

Build the platform other teams build on. Several internal services and product surfaces call these APIs, from Canva AI and Design Agent to the editor, and the photo editor. You'll design contracts that survive constant model churn: backwards-compatible proto evolution, sensible defaults, completion and notification semantics callers can rely on, and requirements like content provenance, privacy preferences and data-eligibility checks built into the pipeline rather than bolted on later.

Set backend direction and raise the bar. You'll act as the backend tech lead for the team, shaping architecture and design reviews alongside the team's ML tech lead, and raising backend craft across a team of both backend and ML engineers.

Partner across teams. Product teams on requirements, our research partners on new models, the inference team on GPU serving, and consumer teams on landing new capabilities on the platform.

You're probably a match if

You have significant commercial experience designing, building and operating backend systems in production — and staying on call for them.

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

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

You've built asynchronous, job-based systems: queues, workers, state machines, retries, timeouts and partial failure. Our requests take seconds rather than milliseconds, run on scarce GPU capacity and cost real money per call, so correctness under partial failure and cost per request matter more here than raw throughput.

You're happy owning the operational surface as part of the job: metrics and dashboards, autoscaling and capacity, deployment configuration, and progressive rollout behind feature flags.

You have taste in API design, and the discipline to evolve a contract without breaking two dozen downstream callers.

You're comfortable working alongside ML engineers and researchers. You'll write some Python (e.g., worker entry points, job handlers, deployment config) and you should be happy reasoning about a GPU-backed workload as a latency, capacity and cost problem. You don't need PyTorch, model architecture or training experience; that's our ML engineers' craft and we won't test you on it.

You have a track record of leading technical initiatives end to end. This means 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 infrastructure audiences alike.

About the team

The Transforms team sits inside AI Media, in the Generative Foundations group. Our mission is world-class AI editing as a platform capability. This concerns the generative side of editing media people already have, rather than generating from scratch. In practice, that means we run the service that turns editing models into APIs the rest of Canva can call, and several services and surfaces already do.

We partner closely with the Photo AI group (who own product and model selection), CORE (model research) and Inference (GPU serving). We're a small, senior team based in Vienna, recently formed from Canva's Photo AI engineers, and a deliberate mix of backend and ML engineers — this is one of the backend seats.

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.

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