Staff Production Engineer (AWS)

Location: Sydney, Australia

Company

Canva develops a design platform used by 240 million monthly active users, supported by large-scale infrastructure and reliability engineering.

What you will do

• Own a long-term engagement in a high-risk technical domain such as sharding core data stores, resource utilisation, or distributed systems at scale.
• Write production software by instrumenting, refactoring, and rebuilding components that create reliability or performance problems.
• Work alongside product and infrastructure teams to improve shipping velocity, system confidence, and operational outcomes.
• Reduce incidents, recovery time, severity, latency, and engineering toil through software and system improvements.
• Identify patterns that require shared platform capabilities and contribute solutions that scale across Canva.
• Pair with, mentor, and learn from other production engineers.

Requirements

• Experience owning reliability work in large-scale distributed systems and fixing production issues through code.
• Experience embedded in or closely partnering with product or feature teams.
• Commercial production-scale experience with Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language.
• Practical knowledge of sharding, replication, failure modes, consistency trade-offs, networking, Linux internals, and distributed systems patterns.
• Experience with observability, tracing, dashboards, alerting, SLOs, Kubernetes, AWS, and performance analysis.
• Experience with serious production on-call and incident response, plus the ability to influence systems improvements without formal authority.

Nice to have

• Enterprise SaaS production engineering experience.
• JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, and production thread profiling.
• Multi-region architecture, sharding, or data-store migration experience.
• Production experience with eBPF or kernel instrumentation.

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.
• AI-assisted technical assessment may be used during the hiring process.

Hiring process

• Technology interviews include interactive, real-time challenges reflecting production engineering work.
• Some interviews may require solving a problem with an AI tool.