Senior Frontend Engineer - Editing Accessibility (RELOCATE to Sydney)

Job Description Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g’day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you’re probably keen to find out what’s on offer, so we’ll get straight to the point.

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. But we like to think that’s all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you’ll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused 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, not just in theory, 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.

You’re probably a match if:

• You have 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.
• You have 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.
• You can 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.
• You have strong proficiency in TypeScript and React and are comfortable reasoning about component structure and accessibility together.
• You communicate clearly 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. Both directions matter in this role.

It would be a plus if:

• You have experience with WAI-ARIA authoring patterns for complex widgets such as trees, grids, drag-and-drop interactions and dialogs.
• You have experience building accessibility for complex interactions like streaming or real-time UI accessibility, HTML5 canvas, data visualisation, spreadsheets, WYSIWYG, etc.
• You are familiar with browser and native accessibility APIs, including the accessibility tree and platform-specific behaviours.
• You have experience building accessibility features utilising AI.
• You have experience with mobile accessibility, including React Native.
• You have 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 Grou…