Staff Production Engineer (AWS/Kubernetes)

Location: Sydney, Australia

Company

Canva is a design technology company building infrastructure for a large-scale creative platform.

What you will do

• Own long-term engagement in a high-risk technical domain such as sharding core data stores, resource utilisation, or distributed systems.
• Write, instrument, refactor, and rebuild production software that improves reliability and performance at scale.
• Work closely with product and infrastructure teams to improve systems before reliability issues compound.
• Reduce incidents, recovery time, severity, latency, and operational toil.
• Develop shared platform capabilities when recurring system patterns require broader solutions.
• Pair with, mentor, and learn from other production engineers.

Requirements

• Experience owning reliability work in large-scale distributed systems and fixing production issues through code.
• Background embedded in or closely partnering with product or feature teams.
• Production-scale experience with Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language.
• Practical knowledge of sharding, replication, failure modes, consistency trade-offs, networking, Linux internals, and distributed systems patterns.
• Experience with observability, SLOs, Kubernetes, AWS, performance analysis, and serious production incident response.
• Ability to debug unfamiliar large codebases and influence technical decisions without formal authority.

Nice to have

• Enterprise SaaS production engineering experience.
• JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, and production thread profiling.
• Multi-region architecture or data-store migration experience.
• eBPF or kernel instrumentation experience.

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.
• AI-assisted interactive challenges may be included in the technology hiring assessment.

Hiring process

• Assessment includes interactive, real-time technology challenges.
• Some interviews may involve solving a problem with an AI tool.