Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
Collingwood is home to our Melbourne campus—a vibrant, creative hub for connection and impactful work. While Sydney is home to our HQ, Melbourne brings its own unique vibe, with local artwork, lush greenery, and thoughtfully designed spaces to help you collaborate, focus, and feel part of a welcoming community.
Where and how you can work
This role is based in Melbourne and we're looking for someone who calls it 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.
What you'd be doing in this role
The Production Engineering team sits at the intersection of software engineering and the hardest reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure. At 240 M MAUs, the most challenging problems aren't on any product roadmap. Production Engineering exists to find them first and fix them properly, writing software that changes how production behaves. When it works, every team ships with more confidence and Canva gets faster and more resilient for the people who use it every day.
Senior software engineers embed long‐term in the areas that carry the most technical risk, working shoulder‐to‐shoulder with product teams and close enough to the roadmap to shape how features land in production before problems compound. Not operationalising systems. Not running alerts. Writing software that changes how production behaves.
At Principal level, you also define what this practice looks like at Canva—calibration for every hire, engagement, and standard the team sets.
At the moment, this role is focused on:
* Defining the engagement model: How Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, how engagements are scoped, and what handoff actually looks like. This model is new; you're shaping it.
* Leading the hardest engagements: Taking personal ownership of the most technically complex areas, sharding, multi‐region architecture, and JVM performance at scale, while the team builds depth in adjacent domains.
* Setting the technical bar: Defining what it means to be a production engineer at Canva—the standard for technical credibility that future hiring calibrates against.
* Pairing strategy across the team: Deciding how staff and mid‐level engineers are paired and what they should be learning from each engagement. Growing production engineering capability across the org, not just within the team.
* Connecting to the product roadmap: Working with engineering leadership across Canva to ensure Production Engineering is upstream of problems, not downstream, influencing how product teams think about production readiness before they ship.
* Building the measurement story: Incident severity and duration trending down; feature launches going to production cleanly. You define what the metrics are and how they're tracked.
* Compounding at organisation scale: One well‐placed Production Engineering engagement changes how engineers build for years. At Principal level, your leverage is the sum of all those engagements, plus the standard you set for how each one runs.
* What success looks like: As a secondee, develop a trusted relationship with your team, guiding them toward shipping at velocity with more confidence and less toil.
You're probably a match
We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better, and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.
Experience
* Production at scale: Owned reliability in large‐scale distributed systems; investigated how things went wrong and shipped lasting solutions.
* Technical leadership in embedded models: Led or helped shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries, knowing what makes that model work and what makes it fail.
* Hands‐on through seniority: Stayed close to the code; at this level, you're the engineer others consult when the problem is genuinely hard.
* Cross‐org influence: Shaped how teams outside your own make technical decisions because your judgement is trusted.
* JVM or systems depth: Built real things in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language at production scale. Language matters less than depth.
* Distributed systems in practice: Navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency trade‐offs in production.
Technical knowledge
* Linux internals: Reasoned about process scheduling, memory, I/O, and the network stack when a system misbehaves.
* Distributed systems: Navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency trade‐offs in production; including consistent hashing, leader election, consensus, back‐pressure, and circuit breakers.
* Observability tooling: Built tracing, dashboards, and alerting that tells you what's wrong.
* Containerisation and orchestration: Kubernetes in production, at the scheduler level.
* Performance analysis: Profiled JVM applications or systems‐level processes and fixed what you found.
* Cloud infrastructure: AWS in production, across the failure modes that matter at scale.
* Incident response: Been on‐call and have opinions about what good looks like.
Nice to have
* Enterprise SaaS background: Done this specific kind of work at an org that does it well; knows what "production engineering" means beyond a job title.
* JVM internals: Tuned GC and profiled threads in production.
* Multi‐region or sharding experience: Involved in a data store migration or multi‐region architecture where getting it wrong was not an option.
About the Group and Team
Join the Production Engineering Group at Canva, where our mission is to make every system that powers Canva fast, reliable, and ready for the next scale. Infra owns the infrastructure layer that every other team builds on: compute, storage, networking, developer experience, and reliability.
The Reliability Platform subgroup is where Canva seriously thinks about the technical risk that comes with operating at hundreds of millions of users—tooling that helps teams run incidents well, and engineering work that stops incidents from happening in the first place.
Production Engineering sits within Reliability Platform—a small team of senior software engineers embedded in Canva's highest‐risk technical areas, working alongside product and infrastructure teams who own those systems for long‐term engagements. When it works, other teams ship more confidently and incidents that do happen resolve faster and hurt less.
What's in it for you?
Achievements, moments of magic, connectivity and fun are woven into life at Canva. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for success in and outside of work.
* Equity packages — we want our success to be yours too.
* Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers.
* An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your well‐being, social connection, office setup & more.
* Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and support you personally.
We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We're evolving how we assess AI skills in our technology hiring experience. In some interviews, you may be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side.
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.
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