Staff Front-End Engineer - Accessibility Team

Staff Engineer, Accessibility

About

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. We are looking for someone who calls Sydney 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.

The Accessibility team is building something the industry doesn’t have a playbook for. AI agents that can understand how features work, reason about component relationships, and make them accessible automatically. Linting and testing infrastructure that catches issues before they ship. The kind of tooling that lets every product team at Canva ship accessible features as a default, not an extra step at the end.

The strategic bet is AI-assisted accessibility at scale. The interesting work here isn’t adding alt text or running the same audit on a new surface. It’s building the engines — the agents, the automation, the patterns — that make accessibility a property of how the company builds. Every product team at Canva builds on top of what this team ships, and hundreds of millions of users rely on it.

Responsibilities

• Build AI agents for accessibility: Build the agents that can understand component relationships, reason about how features work, and make them accessible automatically.
• Scale through automation: Develop linting, automated testing, and tooling that gives every product team the signal they need to build accessibility at the point of writing the code. Build infrastructure that makes accessibility a property of the platform, not a step at the end.
• Hold the bar as the product grows: Define the systems and the tooling that let accessibility scale alongside the product.
• Influence the broader product specialty: Work across product orgs to shape the patterns, the tooling, and the standards that make accessibility the default.
• Lead with code, not whiteboards: Stay hands-on, live in the code, build the tooling, and ship to production.

Requirements

• Deep accessibility expertise: Built accessible web products at scale, understand WCAG inside out, shipped to it, and know where the spec leaves room for judgment.
• Systems thinking: Built tooling, linting, or testing infrastructure that other engineers use. This role leans more toward a frontend platform than a frontend product.
• Fluent with AI in production: Used agents on real engineering work, ideally tasks that require understanding component relationships and reasoning about behavior, not just generating text. Have a clear-eyed view of what AI can and can’t do in production workflows.
• Comfortable in the unknown: Operated where both the problem and the solution are undefined, and approach ambiguous work with a point of view.
• Strong communicator across disciplines: Can explain accessibility concepts to engineers and engineering concepts to accessibility specialists.
• Production depth in React and TypeScript, with the ability to reason about component structure and accessibility together.
• Production experience building AI agents that operate on code or product surfaces.
• Open-source contributions to the accessibility ecosystem or frontend tooling.
• Experience with scaled programs, including how other large companies approach accessibility at this scale.