# Senior Software Engineer, Canvas Core
**Company:** [Mural](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/mural)
Join Mural's Canvas Core team as a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and maintain the foundational platform powering Mural's visual collaboration experience. You'll own critical systems including real-time collaboration, document editing, asset management, and developer APIs while ensuring the canvas editor remains fast, reliable, and intuitive. This role requires 6+ years of production software experience with strong expertise in TypeScript/JavaScript, distributed systems, and performance optimization in a fast-paced scale-up environment.
**Role:** Senior Software Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** United Kingdom Remote
**Salary:** 180000–250000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mural/1f697347-f148-4136-89f9-17cd7c8b2dd0)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/mural/senior-software-engineer-canvas-core-1f697347
---
## Responsibilities

- Canvas Platform Ownership: Own and deliver new Canvas Core platform capabilities and improvements end-to-end, from problem definition and technical design through implementation, testing, release, measurement, and data-driven iteration
- Product Partnership & Requirement Translation: Partner closely with Product and Design teams to shape high-quality user experiences, translating ambiguous product requirements into clear technical solutions while balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term platform sustainability
- Platform System Architecture: Design and build maintainable Canvas platform systems with ownership for quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience across document models, collaboration protocols, and interaction layers
- Real-time Collaboration Systems: Work on large-scale concurrent and real-time collaboration systems that keep shared documents synchronized across users, contributing to architectural decisions around event ordering, latency optimization, conflict resolution, and failure-mode management
- Developer API & Platform Abstractions: Contribute to developer-friendly APIs, service boundaries, and platform contracts that enable internal teams to build features like diagramming, workshops, presentations, and integrations quickly and safely
- Complex Data Model Implementation: Build and evolve canvas systems with rich document and object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, and sophisticated selection mechanics
- Performance Optimization & Scaling: Drive performance improvements through systematic profiling, bottleneck analysis, architectural simplification, targeted optimization, and strategic refactoring to move expensive computations out of critical interaction paths as document complexity and user activity scale
- AI-Enabled Features Integration: Help design, build, and integrate AI-enabled product capabilities where they intersect with the canvas, document model, real-time collaboration systems, or developer platform, leveraging AI-assisted tools in the development process
- Team Excellence & Knowledge Transfer: Strengthen the Canvas Core team through technical design reviews, code reviews, demos, mentoring, documentation, and pragmatic improvements to engineering practices that raise quality and velocity
- Collaborative Problem-Solving: Lead by example through strong technical execution, thoughtful design decisions, high-quality implementation, and collaborative problem-solving with a low-ego approach across engineering, product, and design disciplines

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating mastery of core computer science principles"}

### technical

- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript Proficiency","description":"Advanced fluency in modern JavaScript and TypeScript including ES6+, async patterns, memory management, and optimization for browser and Node.js environments"}
- {"name":"React & Modern Frontend Architecture","description":"Deep experience building scalable React applications with component composition, state management libraries (Redux, Context), hooks, and performance profiling"}
- {"name":"Node.js Backend Development","description":"Strong expertise building production-grade Node.js services including HTTP servers, WebSocket connections for real-time updates, database integration, and API design"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Fundamentals","description":"Strong grasp of distributed system concepts including consistency models, eventual consistency, operational transformation, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), leader election, and failure recovery"}
- {"name":"Real-time Communication Protocols","description":"Experience with WebSocket, message queuing, event streaming, or custom protocols for synchronizing state across distributed clients with low latency"}
- {"name":"Performance Profiling & Optimization","description":"Hands-on ability to profile JavaScript/TypeScript applications, analyze bottlenecks, optimize rendering performance, reduce memory leaks, and scale systems under load"}

### experience

- {"name":"6+ Years Production Software Development","description":"Minimum 6 years building and shipping large-scale production software systems as part of agile engineering teams with end-to-end ownership from design through deployment"}
- {"name":"Platform/Infrastructure Development","description":"Experience building or maintaining core platforms, SDKs, or infrastructure that other teams depend on, with emphasis on developer experience and API design"}
- {"name":"Collaborative Systems Development","description":"Background building collaboration tools, multiplayer systems, shared editing experiences, or low-latency distributed systems managing concurrent user interactions"}
- {"name":"Large-Scale System Design","description":"Demonstrated ability designing and delivering scalable systems handling complexity, maintaining reliability under load, and evolving architecture as requirements grow"}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Fluency in modern JavaScript and TypeScript for building high-performance, maintainable web applications and backend services"}
- {"name":"React Framework","description":"Hands-on experience building complex user interfaces with React, including component architecture, state management, and performance optimization"}
- {"name":"Node.js","description":"Proficiency with Node.js for building scalable backend services, APIs, and real-time systems"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Experience designing and implementing distributed, concurrent, and collaborative systems with understanding of synchronization, consistency, event ordering, and failure modes"}
- {"name":"Real-time Collaboration Architecture","description":"Demonstrated experience building or working with collaboration tools, shared-state systems, or low-latency user experiences with practical knowledge of latency reduction and conflict handling"}
- {"name":"System Performance Optimization","description":"Proven ability in profiling, bottleneck analysis, memory and CPU efficiency, and responsiveness optimization at scale"}
- {"name":"API Design & Service Architecture","description":"Experience designing clean API contracts, service boundaries, data models, versioning strategies, validation, error handling, and maintainable abstractions"}
- {"name":"Production Software Delivery","description":"6+ years experience shipping large-scale production software within agile engineering teams from conception through monitoring and iteration"}

### preferred

- {"name":"Complex Object Models","description":"Experience with rich document or scene models including hierarchical structures, spatial indexing, layout behavior, asset management, and performance-sensitive selection mechanics"}
- {"name":"AI-Assisted Development","description":"Practical hands-on experience using AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows for prototyping, implementation, testing, documentation, and measurement"}
- {"name":"AI-Enabled Product Features","description":"Background building or integrating production AI capabilities such as intelligent editing, automation, recommendations, semantic understanding, or AI-powered collaboration"}
- {"name":"Parallel Processing & Rendering","description":"Familiarity with off-main-thread architectures, rendering pipelines, background computation, Web Workers, multithreaded systems, or GPU-accelerated processing"}
- {"name":"Scale-up Experience","description":"Comfort operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments or scale-ups with rapidly evolving requirements and expanding platform demands"}
- {"name":"Cross-functional Collaboration","description":"Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to work effectively with Product, Design, and Engineering teams in low-ego technical discussions"}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"WebSocket","description":"Protocol for low-latency, bidirectional communication between canvas clients and backend for real-time collaboration and document synchronization"}
- {"name":"Performance Profiling Tools","description":"DevTools for Chrome, Firefox, and Node.js to analyze CPU usage, memory consumption, rendering performance, and identify optimization opportunities"}
- {"name":"Version Control & Git","description":"Source control management for collaborative development, code review, and deployment automation"}
- {"name":"AI-Assisted Development Tools","description":"Modern AI-powered development assistants for code generation, testing, documentation, and engineering workflow acceleration"}

### others

- {"name":"Real-time Message Protocols","description":"Mural's custom real-time message protocol enabling seamless remote collaboration through efficient state synchronization and conflict resolution"}
- {"name":"REST/GraphQL APIs","description":"API design patterns for developer-friendly platform interfaces with proper versioning, validation, error handling, and documentation"}
- {"name":"Concurrent Programming","description":"Patterns for multi-threaded and parallel processing including Web Workers, off-main-thread architectures, and background computation for maintaining UI responsiveness"}

### databases

- {"name":"Real-time State Synchronization","description":"Systems for managing and synchronizing shared document state across clients using event-based architecture, operational transformation, or CRDT approaches"}

### languages

- {"name":"TypeScript","description":"Primary language for type-safe frontend and backend development, enabling maintainable code at scale with strong IDE support and compile-time error detection"}
- {"name":"JavaScript (ES6+)","description":"Modern JavaScript for dynamic behavior, asynchronous operations, and functional programming patterns across browser and Node.js environments"}

### frameworks

- {"name":"React","description":"Component-based frontend framework for building interactive canvas interfaces with state management, hooks, and performance optimization"}
- {"name":"Node.js","description":"JavaScript runtime for building scalable backend services, APIs, WebSocket servers, and real-time collaboration infrastructure"}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Equity Ownership","description":"Stock options providing meaningful ownership stake in Mural's growth as a leading visual collaboration platform"}
- {"name":"Flexible Work Environment","description":"Work arrangement flexibility supporting remote work and distributed team collaboration"}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Investment in continuous learning, conference attendance, and technical skill development opportunities"}
- {"name":"Health & Wellness Coverage","description":"Comprehensive health insurance, dental, vision, and wellness benefits supporting employee well-being"}
- {"name":"Collaborative Culture","description":"Inclusive, low-ego engineering environment with opportunities for technical leadership, design input, and cross-functional impact"}

## Compensation

- **max:** 250000
- **min:** 180000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Screening Call","description":"30-minute conversation with recruiter to discuss background, career motivations, and alignment with Canvas Core team's mission"}
- {"name":"Technical Phone Screen","description":"60-minute technical discussion covering distributed systems concepts, real-time collaboration architecture, and system design approach with a senior engineer"}
- {"name":"System Design Interview","description":"90-minute comprehensive system design exercise focused on canvas platform architecture, real-time collaboration, performance considerations, and API design decisions"}
- {"name":"Take-Home Technical Assessment","description":"Code-based assessment evaluating TypeScript/JavaScript proficiency, system design thinking, and code quality over 2-3 hours"}
- {"name":"Team & Leadership Discussion","description":"Conversations with Canvas Core team members, engineering leadership, and product stakeholders to evaluate collaboration style, platform thinking, and cross-functional partnership skills"}
- {"name":"Final Leadership Interview","description":"Discussion with engineering leadership covering long-term impact, team scaling, and strategic vision for the Canvas platform"}

## Full 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 Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help design, build, and improve the Canvas platform so that the Mural editor remains reliable, high-performing, and intuitive for our users.

You’ll work on 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 clear, maintainable technical solutions.

Senior Engineers at Mural lead by example through strong technical execution, thoughtful design, high-quality implementation, and collaborative problem-solving. They help raise the bar for their team through design discussions, code reviews, mentoring, documentation, and pragmatic improvements to engineering practices.

### WHAT YOU’LL DO

* Own and deliver new Canvas platform capabilities and improvements from problem definition through 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
* Design and build maintainable Canvas platform systems, with accountability for quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience
* Contribute to 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
* Strengthen the team through technical design reviews, demos, code reviews, mentoring, and improvements to engineering practices
* Build and evolve 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, contributing to design decisions around event ordering, latency, conflict handling, and failure-mode management
* Help 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
* 6+ years building and shipping large-scale production software as part of an agile engineering team
* Strong engineering judgment, with experience designing and 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
* Experience building distributed, concurrent, collaborative, or low-latency systems, such as collaboration tools, MMO games, shared-state systems, messaging protocols, or other low-latency user experiences, with familiarity across synchronization, consistency, event ordering, latency, failure modes, and performance trade-offs
* Exposure to 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 is a strong plus
* Interest in AI-enabled product capabilities, or hands-on experience building or integrating them in production, such as intelligent editing, automation, recommendations, semantic document understanding, or collaboration features powered by AI
* Performance optimization experience, 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
* Practical experience using AI-assisted tools to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure engineering work
* Communication and collaboration skills, with a low-ego approach to working with Product, Design, and Engineering, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions, collaborate across teams, and help improve team engineering practices
* Comfort operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments or scale-ups is a plus

Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

### 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.