Principal Partner Engineer — Ecosystem
$297,000–$345,000 year
HybridSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Drive decisions and alignment across Partners and Canva engineering by validating proposed solutions against the real architecture and generating runnable artifacts to back technical choices. Set technical direction for the external platform surface spanning MCP, REST APIs, and Apps-in-Canva, carrying early product direction to partners before they react. Shape strategic partner and customer engagements for flagship AI platforms by holding product shape, engineering feasibility, and partner intent in single conversations that move between roadmap discussions and API design reviews. Work across all external platform surfaces to ensure coherence as new capabilities land, while raising the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering through knowledge sharing and feedback.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- several of those in roles operating at the seam between partner engineering, platform engineering, and product
- built developer platforms
- shipped code in production on platforms used by external developers
- move fluidly between a product roadmap conversation, a system design discussion, and a partner negotiation
- bring a prototype or sample code to a hard conversation
- technically deep on the modern AI platform stack
- real opinions on MCP, tool-use, agentic API design, and the tradeoffs between them
- communicate directly
- resolve misalignments by writing clearly
- worked inside product stacks that are heterogeneous and move fast
- know how to orient yourself quickly in a codebase you didn't write
- raise the technical bar across Ecosystem engineering by sharing knowledge, feedback and bringing others into partner facing wins
Desired Qualifications
- 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
- 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
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