Mostly very nice place to work - Senior Frontend Engineer Canva Employee Review

4.0
Mar 30, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company name. Successful success. Interesting engineer culture, salary, stock options, breakfast and lunch, nice location, smiley people, smart everything (almost). Code quality in most cases is decent. Very open company culture, you know all details about the company progress, what is happening, what should be improved and so on. A lot of opportunities to learn and get fun.

Cons

Rapid company growth affects staff quality sometimes. Some managers play strange games and change rules on the fly. Very fast pace, in half of teams you can forget about drinking coffee with colleagues - you don't have time for that. Cross-team communication issues, constantly. Asynchronous culture doesn't work - you may wait for answers forever. To get answer you need to escalate, and for some reason your manager won't do it even if you ask them, so do it yourself. People says you may be asked to shut up and stop highlight problems on the company level. Expectations from your code are completely different from codebase quality (which is sometimes dirty and hacky) and often unclear. Different teams follow own architecture and code styles, so passing pull request review may be a kraken hell. Code monorepo adds, it's often impossible to avoid conflicts in PRs, difficult to push your changes (github locks/outages). Declared values and approaches not always a truth.

Explore other reviews about Canva

5.0
Jun 24, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

⁠The work culture is amazing and highly collaborative. There are plenty of opportunities to learn new technologies, and the perks/benefits are excellent.⁠The work culture is amazing and highly collaborative. There are plenty of opportunities to learn new technologies, and the perks/benefits are excellent.⁠

Cons

The company is growing very fast, so internal processes and structure change frequently. Work-life balance can be tricky during big product launches.⁠

3.0
May 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Product is beloved by users. Brand affinity is second to none which makes being a marketer a lot of fun. Genuinely good and caring coworkers who want to build something great. Hiring bar is high. Vibe and Thrive benefit is clever and unique.

Cons

Behind the brand is a cult like culture with the “founders” surrounded by yes people (whether they are aware of it or not). Mediocrity seems to be tolerated among management’s “old guard” causing tension and churn with newer and sometimes more experienced leaders. Insecure leaders at some of the highest levels perpetuate much of the toxic behaviors described in the reviews below such as gaslighting and favoritism. People “disappear” with little to no explanation, but hey, it’s the “Canva way”.

6
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