Senior Software Engineer (Observability)

TL;DR

Senior Software Engineer (Observability): Designing and building scalable observability platforms and pipelines to support Canva's engineering teams with an accent on metrics, continuous profiling, and high-throughput data systems. Focus on optimizing querying performance, ensuring system reliability, and evangelizing observability best practices across the organization.

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

Company

Canva is a global visual communication platform empowering everyone to design and publish content.

What you will do

• Design and improve observability platforms, pipelines, and tooling used by all engineers.
• Provide technical leadership to drive pragmatic design decisions and architectural improvements.
• Optimize metrics and continuous profiling platforms for operational effectiveness and reliability.
• Advocate for observability best practices and guide other engineers in querying and visualization.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure effective use of monitoring and insights platforms.
• Participate in team ceremonies and knowledge-sharing initiatives.

Requirements

• Must be based in Sydney, Australia.
• Proficiency in Python, Golang, or Java.
• Deep understanding of computer engineering fundamentals and first principles.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Jsonnet.
• Practical experience with AWS services (EKS, Lambda, S3, MSK) or equivalent cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with observability technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Background in building reliable, high-throughput distributed data systems.

Nice to have

• Deep experience with OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with distributed Prometheus clusters (Thanos, Cortex, Mimir, M3).
• Experience with data pipelining at scale using Kafka or Kinesis.
• Experience running stateful workloads on Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of alerting theory and SLA/SLO best practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity packages for all employees.
• Inclusive parental leave policy.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing and office setup.
• Flexible leave options to support personal recharge and social impact.
• Collaborative, design-focused campus environment in Surry Hills.

Hiring process

• Virtual interview process.
• Includes interactive, real-time technical challenges.
• May involve solving problems using AI tools to demonstrate technical approach.