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Canva

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Principal Production Engineer

🗓️ Posted 2026-09-06 Melbourne, VIC, au Full-time Hybrid ICT

Company shared salary

NA

Market rate

A$14,166–A$20,833/mo (A$169,992–A$249,996/yr)

Based on similar roles (title + domain + location).

About the Company

Canva is redefining how the world experiences design, with 240M MAUs.

About the Role

The Production Engineering team sits at the intersection of software engineering and the hardest reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure. This team exists to find and fix the hardest problems first. The strategic bet is a different model entirely, Canva's own take on what production reliability looks like, built for how they work. Senior software engineers are 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. At Principal level, you will also define what this practice looks like at Canva, serving as the calibration anchor for every hire, every engagement, and every standard the team sets.

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: Take 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: Define what it means to be a production engineer at Canva, the standard for technical credibility, and the archetype that future hiring calibrates against.
  • Pair strategy across the team: Decide how staff and mid-level engineers are paired and what they should be learning from each engagement.
  • Grow production engineering capability across the organization, not just within the team.
  • Connect to the product roadmap: Work 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: Define what the metrics are (incident severity and duration trending down, feature launches going to production cleanly) and how they're tracked.
  • As a secondee, develop a trusted relationship with your team.
  • Guide your team towards shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.

Requirements

  • Experience with production at scale, having owned reliability in large-scale distributed systems.
  • When things went wrong, you investigated how and shipped a solution that lasts forever.
  • Technical leadership in embedded models: You've led or helped shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries rather than within a single one.
Credential Requirements for Australia

Requirements shown are for Indian professionals relocating to Australia.

🟡

ACS Skills Assessment

Australian Computer Society

Required for PR/Visa
Cost: AUD 530 Timeline: 6–8 weeks

Required for skilled visa (189/190/491) only — not required to work as IT professional