Josh Toit
Software Engineer Team Lead at Canva
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJosh Toit is a software engineer and team lead based in Sydney with 11 years of experience building scalable web and backend systems, currently leading engineering at Canva. He started coding at 11 and brings a long-standing passion for improving developer-facing systems, evidenced by core contributions to high-profile open-source Rust projects like dprint and pulldown-cmark that focus on performance, memory efficiency, and robust parsing. Josh has driven major feature releases and platform improvements at large marketplaces such as Freelancer.com and has hands-on experience across API design, notifications services, and internal tools used company-wide. He blends startup-minded product focus with disciplined engineering practices, mentors engineers, and maintains a habit of writing about technical topics weekly. Not immediately obvious: his open-source work shows a preference for low-level refactors that yield measurable runtime and memory gains, reflecting a systems-oriented approach to everyday application problems.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
High School Certificate, Extension 2 Maths, Advanced English, Software Design and Development and Physics, 91.05, High School Certificate, Extension 2 Maths, Advanced English, Software Design and Development and Physics, 91.05 at Barker CollegeBSc Computer Science, Software Engineering, BSc Computer Science, Software Engineering at UNSW AustraliaComputer Science, Computer Science at National Computer Science Summer School
English
Stackoverflow
679reputation
59kreached
14answers
12questions
Github Skills (20)
parserator10
markdown10
parser10
data-structure10
markdown-it10
commonmark10
data-structures10
rust10
algorithm9
algorithms9
memory-management9
cli9
tkinter6
mongodb6
ping6
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
dprint/dprint
Oct 2021 - Feb 2022
Pluggable and configurable code formatting platform that unifies all your formatters.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 4 PRs, 2 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Josh made several core improvements to the dprint project. The commits focused on refactoring and optimizing the formatting core, including replacing data structures for better memory usage and deriving traits. Further contributions included modifying the CLI to improve stdin handling and removing unnecessary constraints. The user's work demonstrates a focus on improving the project's internal structure and efficiency.
code-formattingformattersformatter
pulldown-cmark/pulldown-cmark
Mar 2019 - Mar 2019
An efficient, reliable parser for CommonMark, a standard dialect of Markdown
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 5 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Josh primarily focused on refactoring and improving the `pulldown-cmark` parser, as evidenced by numerous commits modifying the scanner and parser code. The contributions involved updating function return types to use `Option` for better error handling, which improved the overall robustness of the parser. They also implemented the `Clone` trait for essential parser structures. This work directly impacts the efficiency and reliability of the Markdown parsing process.
commonmarkmarkdownparserrust
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