Principal Production Engineer

Location: Sydney, Australia

Company

Canva is a design technology company operating a large-scale platform used by hundreds of millions of monthly active users.

What you will do

• Define how Production Engineering partners with product and infrastructure teams, including engagement scope and handoffs.
• Lead technically complex reliability engagements involving sharding, multi-region architecture, and JVM performance at scale.
• Set the technical standards and hiring calibration criteria for Production Engineering.
• Pair staff and mid-level engineers across engagements and grow production engineering capability across the organisation.
• Influence product teams and engineering leadership to address production readiness before features ship.
• Define reliability metrics, track incident severity and duration, and improve launch quality and engineering velocity.

Requirements

• Experience owning reliability for large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on senior-level software engineering experience with Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language.
• Experience shaping embedded engineering models and influencing technical decisions across organisational boundaries.
• Practical expertise in distributed systems, including sharding, replication, failure modes, consistency trade-offs, consensus, and backpressure.
• Experience with Linux internals, Kubernetes in production, AWS, observability tooling, performance analysis, and incident response.
• Ability to remain close to the code while setting technical direction at organisation scale.

Nice to have

• Enterprise SaaS experience in production engineering.
• JVM internals experience, including garbage collection tuning and thread profiling.
• Experience with data store migrations, multi-region architecture, or sharding.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent full-time employment.
• Equity package.
• Inclusive parental leave for parents and carers.
• Annual allowance supporting wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options.
• Virtual interviews and interview adjustments available when needed.

Hiring process

• Interviews are conducted virtually.
• The process may include interactive, real-time technical challenges and problem-solving with an AI tool.