search Browse Jobs
Principal Production EngineerCanva · Sydney, au
Canva logo

Canva

company page ↗ Visa Sponsoring Company

Principal Production Engineer

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

🗓️ Posted 2026-09-06 Sydney, au Full-time Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market A$14,166–A$20,833/mo

About the Company

Canva is a company that redefines how the world experiences design. With 240M MAUs, Canva aims to be faster and more resilient for its users every day.

About the Job

The Production Engineering team at Canva works at the intersection of software engineering and the most challenging reliability problems in the company's infrastructure. This role involves finding and fixing these problems by writing software that changes how production behaves, rather than just operationalizing systems or running alerts. Senior software engineers are embedded long-term in high-technical-risk areas, collaborating with product teams to shape how features land in production before problems arise. At the Principal level, you will define the practice of Production Engineering at Canva, serving as a calibration anchor for hiring, engagements, and team standards.

Role & Responsibilities

  • ● Define the engagement model: How Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, how engagements are scoped, and what handoff actually looks like.
  • ● Lead 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.
  • ● Set 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.
  • ● Pair strategy across the team: Deciding how staff and mid-level engineers are paired and what they should be learning from each engagement.
  • ● Grow production engineering capability across the org, not just within the team.
  • ● Connect to the product roadmap: Working with engineering leadership across Canva to ensure Production Engineering is upstream of problems, not downstream.
  • ● Influence how product teams think about production readiness before they ship.
  • ● Build the measurement story: Incident severity and duration trending down. Feature launches going to production cleanly.
Show 4 more
  • ● Define what the metrics are and how they're tracked.
  • ● Achieve compounding at organisation scale: One well-placed Production Engineering engagement changes how engineers build for years.
  • ● Develop a trusted relationship with your team as a secondee.
  • ● Guide your team towards shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.

Requirements

Experience

  • ● Experience with production at scale, owning reliability in large-scale distributed systems.

Skills

  • ● Investigate how things broke and shipped solutions that last forever.
  • ● Technical leadership in embedded models, having led or helped shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries rather than within a single one.