International Strategy Lead

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 ads can feel a bit formulaic sometimes, but we promise Canva is anything but. If you're drawn to what we're building and you see yourself in this role, we'd love to hear from you. Where and How You Can Work Our London office is a hub for collaboration and energy. But we also believe in working where you do your best thinking. This role is based in London, with the flexibility to work in a way that suits you. Canva's mission is to empower the world to design. With 285+ million monthly active users across 190+ countries, we're building the world's most loved visual communication platform. We're not a template tool. We're an AI-powered visual work platform that's replacing legacy tools across design, documents, presentations, video, and websites. About the role: This is not an operations role, and it is not a "run the playbook" role. We're looking for a strategist who will figure out what the playbook should be. You'll sit on the International Supergroup Leadership Team (SGL) and work directly with the Head of International to answer two questions. Top-down: how should we segment our markets and allocate investment across them? Bottom-up: what causally drives growth in each market, and how do we make it repeatable? International is accountable for both MAU and ARR. In this role you'll form hypotheses, follow hunches, place bold bets, and validate with data. You'll partner closely with the Data Lead, Finance Lead, Leadership Operations, Country Managers, and central product, content and marketing teams. The team is globally distributed: leadership across Sydney, Europe and Dubai time zones, specialties in Sydney, and teams in every market, which gives this role real autonomy. What you'll do: Portfolio Strategy (Top-Down): Segment the 23 Pioneer markets by penetration, maturity and competitive landscape, and decide how our playbook should differ: one playbook with modules maximised per market, or different playbooks for different clusters. Shape investment allocation. Partner with Finance to build the principles for deploying headcount, contingent workers and marketing budget across the portfolio, and feed the monthly MBR conversation. Pressure-test market and vertical bets. Invest more in some countries to grow them faster while doing product-only work in others. Build the cases and make the calls with the Head of International. Growth Drivers & Funnel Excellence (Bottom-Up) Find the causal growth drivers. Go beyond correlation to identify what genuinely drives each stage of the funnel in each market, across product-led growth and product distribution, working hand in hand with the International Data Lead. Diagnose and tighten the funnel. Analyse why the same product produces 20% 7-day activation in one market and 35% in another, isolate the causes (content, localisation, payments, channels), and turn them into prescriptive plays countries can run. Crystallise what you find into repeatable playbooks. You don't have to write every playbook, but you identify the causalities so they become repeatable by the countries. Scaling What Works Across Markets Work with Country Managers and develop growth hunches with them, validate what's working locally, and make it scalable. Retention and reactivation playbooks for markets like Brazil are the first proving ground. Live in exploration mode. Form hypotheses, follow hunches, place bold bets, and validate with data. Win buy-in from stakeholders through evidence rather than authority. You're a match if you have: Exceptional analytical skills. You structure ambiguous problems, separate causality from correlation, and draw conclusions others miss. Proven growth strategy experience at a consumer technology or digital platform company, with results you can personally attribute. You can articulate a clean growth thesis backed by data, not just intuition. Comfort with ambiguity. You are energised by open questions, form a hunch, pursue it, and course-correct fast. Genuine growth instinct. You understand funnels end to end, from acquisition and activation through to monetisation and retention, and you bring strong user intuition to match the data. Strategic range. You can zoom out to portfolio-level allocation questions and zoom in to why one market's activation rate breaks. Data-led decision maker with a strong experimentation mindset. You don't rely on gut alone: you test, measure, and iterate. Bold, with bias to action. You place bets, hustle to validate them, and would rather be proven wrong fast than right slowly. Exceptional stakeholder craft. You align Country Managers, Finance and central teams behind your recommendations, and you're comfortable operating in a matrix organisation with distributed authority. Intellectually honest and first-principles driven. You say what the data says, flag problems early, deconstruct problems from…