Verified Job
IT / Software / Data Analyst
Principal Production Engineer
IT / Software / Data Analyst
#46670
Remote / WFH
canva
Job Description
Job Description
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 hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.
Where and how you can work
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.
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 240M MAUs, the hardest problems aren't on any product roadmap. Production Engineering exists to find them first and fix them properly. Writing software. Changing 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.
The strategic bet is a different model entirely. Canva's own take on what production reliability looks like, built for how we work. Senior software engineers embedded long-term in the areas that carry the most technical risk, working shoulder to shoulder with product teams, close enough to the roadmap to shape how features land in production before the problems compound. Not operationalising systems. Not running alerts. Writing software that changes how production behaves.
The engineers who do this work well have gone deep in systems most people only operate. They can walk into a codebase they didn't write, understand what's actually happening at scale, win the technical respect of the team they're embedded with, and then bend the software to make it more reliable, more efficient, and more resilient.
At Principal level, you're also the person who defines what this practice looks like at Canva. The calibration anchor for every hire, every engagement, and every 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, JVM performance at scale, while the team builds depth in adjacent domains.
Setting the technical bar: What it means to be a production engineer at Canva. The standard for technical credibility. The archetype 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, developing trusted relationship with your team. Guiding them towards, 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.
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 hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.
Where and how you can work
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.
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 240M MAUs, the hardest problems aren't on any product roadmap. Production Engineering exists to find them first and fix them properly. Writing software. Changing 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.
The strategic bet is a different model entirely. Canva's own take on what production reliability looks like, built for how we work. Senior software engineers embedded long-term in the areas that carry the most technical risk, working shoulder to shoulder with product teams, close enough to the roadmap to shape how features land in production before the problems compound. Not operationalising systems. Not running alerts. Writing software that changes how production behaves.
The engineers who do this work well have gone deep in systems most people only operate. They can walk into a codebase they didn't write, understand what's actually happening at scale, win the technical respect of the team they're embedded with, and then bend the software to make it more reliable, more efficient, and more resilient.
At Principal level, you're also the person who defines what this practice looks like at Canva. The calibration anchor for every hire, every engagement, and every 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, JVM performance at scale, while the team builds depth in adjacent domains.
Setting the technical bar: What it means to be a production engineer at Canva. The standard for technical credibility. The archetype 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, developing trusted relationship with your team. Guiding them towards, 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.
