Principal Production Engineer

Responsibilities

• Define the Production Engineering engagement model and how it pairs with product and infrastructure teams
• Lead technically complex engagements involving sharding, multi-region architecture, and JVM performance
• Set the technical bar and standards for production engineering at Canva
• Develop pairing strategies to grow engineering capability across the organization
• Influence the product roadmap to ensure production readiness upstream of problems
• Define and track metrics for incident severity, duration, and feature launch success

Requirements

• Experience owning reliability in large-scale distributed systems
• Proven technical leadership in embedded or cross-functional engineering models
• Hands-on coding expertise in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or comparable systems languages
• Deep understanding of Linux internals (process scheduling, memory, I/O, network stack)
• Proficiency with distributed systems concepts (sharding, replication, consensus, circuit breakers)
• Experience with observability tooling, Kubernetes, and AWS in production environments
• Experience with performance analysis and profiling JVM or system-level processes

Preferred Qualifications

• Enterprise SaaS background
• Deep JVM internals knowledge, including GC tuning and thread profiling
• Experience with multi-region architecture or large-scale data store migrations

Benefits

• Equity packages
• Inclusive parental leave policy
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance
• Flexible leave options

About the Company

Canva is a global design platform redefining how the world experiences design. The Production Engineering Group works within the Reliability Platform to ensure systems are fast, reliable, and ready to scale for hundreds of millions of users.