Staff Software Engineer, Core Canvas
Job description
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Canvas Core team builds and maintains the foundational platform that powers Mural’s visual thinking experience. This includes the infinite canvas, key editor components, document editing behaviors, asset management, real-time collaboration, and the systems that enable fast, reliable, and intuitive interaction on the canvas.
We’re also responsible for the Mural UI, the real-time message protocol that enables seamless remote collaboration, and the developer-friendly APIs that internal teams use to build features like diagramming, workshops, presentations, integrations, and AI-enabled product capabilities.
Our mission is to ensure the Mural editor is fast, reliable, intuitive, and easy to build on.
We prioritize performance, simplicity, developer experience, and platform quality, enabling teams across the company to ship quickly and safely on top of Canvas Core.
YOUR MISSION
As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll play a key role in shaping the technical direction of the Canvas platform and ensuring the Mural editor is reliable, high-performing, and intuitive for our users.
You’ll help design and maintain the systems that power real-time collaboration, shared document editing, spatial interactions, rendering and interaction performance, asset management, developer APIs, and AI-enabled product capabilities across the Mural editor.
Your role will be to reduce platform complexity, improve the quality and speed of Canvas development, and help teams ship high-quality editor experiences quickly and safely. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to turn ambiguous product and platform problems into high-quality technical solutions.
Staff Engineers at Mural lead, design, and implement complex technical projects that affect multiple teams. They contribute to team, department, and company-wide engineering standards, processes, and culture, and provide mentorship and support for other engineers.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Lead new Canvas platform capabilities and improvements from early problem definition through prototyping, implementation, release, measurement, and iteration
Partner with Product and Design to shape high-quality user experiences, balancing pragmatic technical delivery with long-term platform needs
Architect and build flexible, maintainable Canvas platform systems, with accountability for quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience
Design and evolve developer-friendly APIs, service boundaries, and platform contracts that internal teams can build on quickly and safely
Use AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows as part of your engineering practice to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure work effectively
Elevate the team’s skills and knowledge through technical design reviews, demos, code reviews, mentoring, and improvements to team, department, and company-wide engineering standards, processes, and culture
Build and evolve complex canvas systems with rich document and object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, and selection mechanics
Work on large-scale concurrent and real-time collaboration systems that keep shared documents synchronized across users, designing for event ordering, latency, conflict handling, and failure-mode management
Design, build, and integrate AI-enabled product capabilities where they intersect with the canvas, document model, real-time collaboration systems, or developer platform
Improve performance through profiling, bottleneck analysis, architectural simplification, targeted optimization, and moving expensive work out of critical interaction paths so systems remain responsive as document complexity and user activity scale
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
Fluency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript, with familiarity in React, Node.js, or comparable modern frameworks
10+ years building and shipping large-scale production software as part of an agile engineering team
Systems architecture judgment, with a track record of delivering scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and developer-facing abstractions that balance simplicity, developer experience, and long-term maintainability
Experience designing clean API contracts and service boundaries, including thoughtful data models, versioning, validation, error handling, documentation, and long-term maintainability
3+ years building distributed, concurrent, or real-time systems, such as collaboration tools, MMO games, shared-state systems, messaging protocols, or other low-latency user experiences, with depth in synchronization, consistency, event ordering, latency, failure modes, and performance trade-offs
Strong background architecting complex systems with rich object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, selection mechanics, and performance-sensitive user interactions
A track record of building or integrating AI-enabled product capabilities in production, such as intelligent editing, automation, recommendations, semantic document understanding, or collaboration features powered by AI
Performance optimization expertise, including profiling, bottleneck analysis, memory and CPU efficiency, latency reduction, and responsiveness as document complexity and user activity scale
Familiarity with parallel processing, off-main-thread architectures, rendering pipelines, background computation, or other multithreaded systems is a plus
A practical, outcome-oriented approach to AI-driven development practices, including using AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure engineering work
Proven technical project leadership, including planning and delivering new systems and features iteratively with a focus on customer value
Communication and collaboration skills, with a low-ego approach to working with Product, Design, and Engineering, and the ability to lead technical discussions, influence technical direction, mentor engineers, work cross-team, and contribute to engineering standards, processes, and culture
Comfort operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments or scale-ups is a plus
Equal Opportunity
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.