Staff Front End Engineer - Portable Platform
RemoteAustralia
Job Summary
Design and ship the frontend architecture for the Portable Platform, enabling React engineers to write once and run across web, iOS, and Android. Lead the transition from a pure React Web codebase to a shared architecture where runtime concerns are abstracted from product code. Own the web implementations of common abstractions and support the upskilling of 600+ frontend engineers through code standards, documentation, and design reviews. Bring SSR and React Server Components into the picture, reasoning about how backend systems wire up to the portable frontend layer. Stay hands-on by writing design docs, committing to production, and driving measurable performance gains. This role sits at the center of Canva's biggest engineering bet, shaping the foundations for hundreds of millions of users.
Required Qualifications
- React at depth: You understand how React is built, reconciliation, the rendering model, the server component model. You've made decisions below the framework's surface.
- Performance in depth: You've driven measurable gains on a complex frontend product and know how to distinguish a real win from a misleading benchmark.
- Portable or cross-platform experience: You've worked on a codebase that runs across more than one runtime and understand the trade-offs of abstracting at the component layer.
- React Native mental model: You don't need to be a mobile expert, but you understand how React Native differs from React Web and how engineers need to think differently when targeting both runtimes.
- Cross-team influence: You've shipped something that changed how more than one team builds, through documentation, prototypes, and direct conversation.
- Hands-on: Writing code day-to-day. Recent commits, recent design docs, recent reviews.
- AI fluency: You've used AI tooling in real engineering work and have a view on what it changes for frontend development.
Desired Qualifications
- SSR and React Server Components: Familiarity with server-side rendering and RSC patterns — how a backend wires up to a React frontend, and where this fits in the Portable Platform story.
- React Native experience: Hands-on React Native work, even at a surface level. If you've shipped something in React Native, that's a genuine plus.
- Open-source contributions: React, React Native, or the broader frontend ecosystem.
- Design system or component library depth: Experience building shared component abstractions that other engineers consume, especially abstractions that need to work across different rendering environments.
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