Principal Production Engineer in Melbourne

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. 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.

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.

What You'd Be Doing In This Role:

• Writing software that changes how production behaves.
• Defining the engagement model: How Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, how engagements are scoped, and what handoff actually looks like.
• Leading the hardest engagements: Taking personal ownership of the most technically complex areas, sharding, multi-region architecture, JVM performance at scale.
• Setting the technical bar: What it means to be a production engineer at Canva.
• 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.
• Building the measurement story: Incident severity and duration trending down. Feature launches going to production cleanly.
• Compounding at organisation scale: One well-placed Production Engineering engagement changes how engineers build for years.

What success looks like: As a secondee, developing trusted relationships with your team. Guiding them towards shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.

You’re probably a match if you fit one or more of these:

• Production at scale: You've owned reliability in large-scale distributed systems.
• Technical leadership in embedded models: You've led or helped shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries.
• Hands-on through seniority: You've stayed close to the code.
• Cross-org influence: You've shaped how teams outside your own make technical decisions.
• JVM or systems depth: You've built real things in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language at production scale.
• Distributed systems in practice: You've navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency tradeoffs in production.

Technical knowledge:

• Linux internals: You can reason about process scheduling, memory, I/O, and the network stack when a system misbehaves.
• Distributed systems: You've navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency tradeoffs in production.
• Observability tooling: You've built the tracing, dashboards, and alerting that tells you what's wrong.
• Containerisation and orchestration: Kubernetes in production, at the scheduler level.
• Performance analysis: You've 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: You've been on-call and have opinions about what good looks like.

Nice to have:

• Enterprise SaaS background: You've done this specific kind of work at an org that's done it well.
• JVM internals: You've tuned GC and profiled threads in production.
• Multi-region or sharding experience: You've been involved in a data store migration or multi-region architecture.

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.

What’s in it for you? Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard — and we do — but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every 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 wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more.
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.