Staff Production Engineer

TL;DR

Staff Production Engineer (Reliability): Building and optimizing high-scale distributed systems at Canva with an accent on reliability, performance, and resilience. Focus on embedding within product teams to solve complex technical risks, refactoring core infrastructure, and improving system behavior at 240M+ MAUs.

Location: Must be based in Melbourne, Australia. The role is hybrid, requiring regular in-person collaboration at the Melbourne campus.

Company

Canva is a global visual communication platform empowering the world to design.

What you will do

• Own long-term reliability for high-risk technical domains, including sharding and resource utilization.
• Write production-grade software to instrument, refactor, and rebuild critical system components.
• Embed within product teams to shape roadmap execution and mitigate technical risks early.
• Collaborate with fellow engineers to mentor, pair, and share reliability best practices.
• Contribute to shared platform capabilities that scale beyond individual engagement areas.
• Optimize system metrics such as incident frequency, recovery time, and latency.

Requirements

• Must be based in Melbourne, Australia.
• Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems and reliability engineering.
• Commercial proficiency in systems languages such as Java, Go, Rust, or C++.
• Strong understanding of Linux internals, networking, and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Proven ability to debug unfamiliar codebases and perform performance analysis at scale.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and incident response in production environments.

Nice to have

• Background in Enterprise SaaS production engineering.
• Deep knowledge of JVM internals, including GC tuning and thread profiling.
• Experience with multi-region architectures or data store migrations.
• Practical experience with eBPF or kernel-level instrumentation.

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 time and recharging.
• Creative, collaborative, and inclusive work environment.

Hiring process

• Interviews are conducted virtually.
• Includes interactive, real-time technical challenges.
• May involve solving problems using AI tools to demonstrate technical approach.