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Principal Production EngineerCanva · Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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Canva

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Principal Production Engineer

✓ This company has sponsored visas before. The posting doesn't say so, but it's still worth applying.

🗓️ Posted 2026-08-26 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Full-time Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market A$14,000–A$20,000/mo

About the Company

Empower the world to design. We're a global online visual communications platform on a mission to empower the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful on Canva on any device, from anywhere in the world. Since our launch in 2013, we've had the crazy big goal of making design accessible to everyone. We were founded on the belief that people shouldn't need to understand complex software to unlock their creativity. We're leveling the playing field and democratizing access to design and visual communication by empowering 100% of the world to communicate in a way that was once limited to the 1%. We've always had a deeper mission surrounding Canva - which we talk about as our 'simple' two-step plan: to build one of the world's most valuable companies, and to do the most good we possibly can. We're committed to our core value of Being a Force for Good, so as the value of our company grows, so too does our ability to have a positive impact on the world. Software Development Specialties: Design, Graphic Design, Web app, Software engineering, Startup, Technology, Innovation, Publishing, product design

Responsibilities

  • ● Job Description
  • ● Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte
  • ● Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.
  • ● What you'd be doing in this role
  • ● The Production Engineering team sits at the intersection of software engineering and the hardest reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure. At 240M MAUs, the hardest problems aren't on any product roadmap. Production Engineering exists to find them first and fix them properly. Writing software. Changing how production behaves. When it works, every team ships with more confidence and Canva gets faster and more resilient for the people who use it every day.
  • ● The strategic bet is a different model entirely. Canva's own take on what production reliability looks like, built for how we work. Senior software engineers embedded long-term in the areas that carry the most technical risk, working shoulder to shoulder with product teams, close enough to the roadmap to shape how features land in production before the problems compound. Not operationalising systems. Not running alerts. Writing software that changes how production behaves.
  • ● The engineers who do this work well have gone deep in systems most people only operate. They can walk into a codebase they didn't write, understand what's actually happening at scale, win the technical respect of the team they're embedded with, and then bend the software to make it more reliable, more efficient, and more resilient.
  • ● At Principal level, you're also the person who defines what this practice looks like at Canva. The calibration anchor for every hire, every engagement, and every standard the team sets.
  • ● At the moment, this role is focused on:
  • ● Defining the engagement model: How Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, how engagements are scoped, and what handoff actually looks like. This model is new. You're shaping it.
  • ● Leading the hardest engagements: Taking personal ownership of the most technically complex areas, sharding, multi-region architecture, JVM performance at scale, while the team builds depth in adjacent domains.
  • ● Setting the technical bar: What it means to be a production engineer at Canva. The standard for technical credibility. The archetype that future hiring calibrates against.
  • ● Pairing strategy across the team: Deciding how staff and mid-level engineers are paired and what they should be learning from each engagement. Growing production engineering capability across the org, not just within the team.
  • ● Connecting to the product roadmap: Working with engineering leadership across Canva to ensure Production Engineering is upstream of problems, not downstream. Influencing how product teams think about production readiness before they ship.
  • ● Building the measurement story: Incident severity and duration trending down. Feature launches going to production cleanly. You define what the metrics are and how they're tracked.
  • ● Compounding at organisation scale: One well-placed Production Engineering engagement changes how engineers build for years. At Principal level, your leverage is the sum of all those engagements, plus the standard you set for how each one runs.
  • ● What success looks like: As a secondee, developing trusted relationship with your team. Guiding them towards, shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.
  • ● You're probably a match
  • ● We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.