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Staff Production EngineerCanva · Melbourne, VIC, au
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Canva

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Staff Production Engineer

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🗓️ Posted 2026-09-06 Melbourne, VIC, au Full-time Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market A$12,500–A$18,333/mo

About the Company

Canva is a company redefining how the world experiences design, with 240 million monthly active users and growing.

About the Job

The Production Engineering team sits at the intersection of software engineering and the hardest reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure. Writing software that changes how production behaves at 240M MAUs and growing. 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 it lands 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 improve the software to make it more reliable, more efficient, and more resilient.

Role & Responsibilities

  • ● Owning an engagement area: Taking long-term accountability for one of Canva's highest-risk technical domains, sharding core data stores, resource utilisation, distributed systems challenges at scale embedded alongside the team that owns it.
  • ● Writing production software: The work is code, not process. Instrumenting, refactoring, rebuilding the pieces that cause problems at scale. You're a software engineer first; the reliability outcome at scale is what you're optimising for.
  • ● Collaboration: Opportunity to pair, mentor and learn from fellow production engineers.
  • ● Customer First: Striving for fewer incidents, faster recovery, lower severity, latency that bends in the right direction. Taking pride in moving needle metrics, that positively impacts the quality of the customer experience.
  • ● Platform contributions: Where you see a pattern that needs a shared capability, you bring it back, not to own it indefinitely, but to seed the platform work that scales beyond your engagement.
  • ● Compounding at the system layer: One engineer who truly understands a system can change how every other engineer builds on top of it. That's the leverage in this role and why the archetype matters more than the domain.
  • ● As a secondee, developing trusted relationship with your team. Guiding them towards shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.

Requirements

  • ● Experience Production at scale: Owned reliability work within large-scale distributed systems. When things broke, you wrote the fix, not the ticket.
  • ● Embedded delivery: Previously worked as an engineer embedded in or partnering closely with a product or feature team, not siloed in a platform org that throws tools over the fence.
  • ● JVM or systems depth: You've built real things in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language at production scale; commercial depth, not academic familiarity. We're language-flexible for the right engineer, but you need to show up and win the technical duel in the first meeting.
  • ● Distributed systems in practice: Navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, consistency tradeoffs in real systems.
  • ● Debugging large codebases: Ability to parachute into an unfamiliar codebase, orient quickly, find where the problem actually lives, and fix it.
  • ● Influence without authority: Proven to have made things better in systems through wisdom and trust.
  • ● Technical knowledge Networking Depth: You know the network stack and what it does.