Production Engineering Manager

Location: Sydney NSW, Australia

Company

Canva is a product company whose infrastructure supports more than 250 million monthly active users.

What you will do

• Lead Core, one of Production Engineering's two teams, and guide software engineers working on services and cross-team engineering problems.
• Turn complex and ambiguous problems into focused engineering goals, priorities, and delivered initiatives.
• Stay close to technical work, challenge assumptions, evaluate trade-offs, and support autonomous engineering decisions.
• Define Core's next phase, including team focus, initiative structure, measurement, and reusable engineering capabilities.
• Coach engineers, set priorities, create psychological safety, and help the team develop organisational fluency and influence.
• Build reliable services and engineering standards that scale across Canva and strengthen collaboration between Core and Embedded.

Requirements

• Experience leading software engineers through complex or ambiguous technical work and coaching them toward greater autonomy.
• Experience in production software environments where reliability, scalability, and operational risk are important.
• Experience owning significant technical initiatives from problem definition through delivery across multiple teams.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading, and data structures.
• Working depth in Go, Python, Java, or C++, plus knowledge of system internals, networking, cloud platforms, system design, and architecture.
• Familiarity with observability, capacity, failure modes, production operations, and large-scale or high-criticality systems.

Nice to have

• Experience leading Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or a related function.
• Experience with large-scale storage, CDN, networking, or distributed infrastructure.
• Experience developing technical leaders and shaping an evolving technical team's scope and ways of working.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity package.
• Inclusive parental leave for parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options.
• Interviews are conducted virtually and may include interactive AI-related technical challenges.

Hiring process

• Virtual interviews focused on experience, skills, passion, and cultural contribution.
• Interactive, real-time challenges may assess AI-related skills, including problem-solving with an AI tool.