Principal Production Engineer (SaaS)

TL;DR

Principal Production Engineer (SaaS): Leading reliability strategy and solving complex infrastructure challenges for a high-scale distributed platform with an accent on system architecture, performance optimization, and embedded technical leadership. Focus on defining production engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and proactively mitigating technical risks across the organization.

Location: Must be based in Melbourne, Australia. The role follows a hybrid model requiring regular on-campus collaboration.

Company

Canva is a global visual communication platform redefining how the world experiences design.

What you will do

• Define the engagement model for how Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams.
• Take personal ownership of technically complex areas including sharding, multi-region architecture, and JVM performance.
• Set the technical bar and archetype for production engineering excellence at Canva.
• Influence engineering leadership to ensure production readiness is prioritized upstream in the product roadmap.
• Develop metrics to track incident severity, duration, and feature launch stability.
• Mentor staff and mid-level engineers to grow production engineering capability across the organization.

Requirements

• Must be based in Melbourne and able to work from the campus.
• Extensive experience owning reliability in large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record of technical leadership in embedded or cross-team models.
• Deep expertise in systems programming (Java, Go, Rust, or C++).
• Strong knowledge of Linux internals, Kubernetes, and AWS infrastructure.
• Experience with performance analysis, observability tooling, and incident response.

Nice to have

• Background in Enterprise SaaS environments.
• Deep expertise in JVM internals (GC tuning, thread profiling).
• Experience with multi-region data store migrations or complex sharding.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity packages to share in company success.
• Inclusive parental leave policy for all parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing and office setup.
• Flexible leave options to support personal recharge and social connection.
• Collaborative, creative, and welcoming community environment.