Senior Frontend Engineer - Editing Accessibility (RELOCATE to Sydney)

Where And How You Can Work

Our flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva—an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect. This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What You’d Be Doing In This Role

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. Here’s the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on:

• Designing and building accessible interactions in the Editor, including focus management, keyboard navigation, live regions, and the ARIA roles and states that accurately reflect what the product is doing. This is hands-on engineering work that requires understanding both the Editor's component architecture and how assistive technologies interpret it.
• Using screen readers as a daily development tool to test, debug, and validate your work. You should be familiar with the differences between VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS in practice, including where they diverge from each other and where real-world behaviour differs from the spec.
• Collaborating with engineers across the Editing Group to help them build accessible features from the start. This includes reviewing designs and pull requests, providing technical guidance, and working with teams to identify and resolve accessibility issues before they ship.
• Identifying systemic accessibility gaps in the Editor and developing solutions that address the underlying cause rather than patching individual instances. When the same class of problem keeps appearing, the right answer is usually an architectural one.

Requirements

• Solid commercial experience building accessible web applications, with a good understanding of WCAG in practice rather than just on paper. You've shipped to the standard and you know where judgment calls come up.
• Hands-on experience developing with screen readers. You should understand how VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS behave technically, including their quirks and inconsistencies, and be comfortable debugging assistive technology interactions as part of your normal workflow.
• Ability to work effectively in a large, interconnected frontend codebase. You understand how components, state, and rendering interact, and you approach accessibility as something that needs to be designed into a system rather than applied to it.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and React and are comfortable reasoning about component structure and accessibility together.
• Clear communication across disciplines. You can explain the technical behaviour of a screen reader to an engineer who hasn't used one, and explain the constraints of a complex component to a designer who's trying to get accessibility right.

Nice to Have

• Experience with WAI-ARIA authoring patterns for complex widgets such as trees, grids, drag-and-drop interactions, and dialogs.
• Experience building accessibility for complex interactions like streaming or real-time UI accessibility, HTML5 canvas, data visualisation, spreadsheets, WYSIWYG, etc.
• Familiarity with browser and native accessibility APIs, including the accessibility tree and platform-specific behaviours.
• Experience building accessibility features utilising AI.
• Experience with mobile accessibility, including React Native.
• Prior experience working alongside dedicated accessibility specialists, assistive technology users, or user researchers focused on accessibility.

About The Team

The Editing Accessibility team sits within the Design Experience supergroup, inside the Editing Group. We want to be the most accessible design tool in the world—and with strong, sustained internal support from leadership and core product teams, our Accessibility Teams are set to achieve this mission.

The challenge we're taking on has two sides. The first is making sure everyone can use Canva's Editor, including people who rely on screen readers and other assistive technology. The second is ensuring that what people create in Canva is accessible by default, so designs work for everyone who encounters them. Both dimensions sit at the cutting edge of frontend engineering in modern web applications.

We work closely with engineers, designers, and product managers across the Editing Group, which means clear communication and the ability to earn trust across disciplines is just as important as technical depth. We're looking for a frontend engineer who can work in the Editor's architecture and design accessibility into complex, interconnected systems. Many of the problems this team works on don't have established answers, requiring creative thinking when the spec doesn't quite cover the situation.

A significant part of this role involves using screen readers as a development tool to understand how the Editor communicates with users and where that breaks down. We also work directly with assistive technology users throughout the design and development process, so co-designing solutions with the people who will actually use them is part of how we work. You'll also spend meaningful time working across the Editing Group, helping other teams understand what accessible implementation looks like in practice and reviewing their work as they build new features.

Benefits

• 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.