Principal Production Engineer

Location: Sydney, Australia

Company

Canva is a design technology company building a 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 for Production Engineering at Canva.
• Shape pairing strategies and develop production engineering capability across the organization.
• Influence product roadmaps and production-readiness decisions before features are shipped.
• Define metrics for incident severity, incident duration, deployment quality, and engineering impact.

Requirements

• Experience owning reliability for large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Hands-on software engineering experience at senior or principal level using Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language.
• Technical leadership experience in embedded or cross-team engineering models.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, including sharding, replication, failure modes, consistency trade-offs, consensus, backpressure, and circuit breakers.
• Production experience with Linux internals, Kubernetes, AWS, observability tooling, and incident response.
• Experience profiling JVM applications or systems-level processes and improving their performance.

Nice to have

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

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.
• Virtual interviews and interactive technical challenges, including possible use of AI tools.