Opportunity at
CanvaPrincipal Production Engineer
Canva is hiring a Principal Production Engineer to help set the direction of Production Engineering across the company. The team blends software engineering with the toughest…
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About This Role
Canva is hiring a Principal Production Engineer to help set the direction of Production Engineering across the company. The team blends software engineering with the toughest reliability challenges in Canva's infrastructure, supporting a product with roughly 240 million monthly active users. Principals are senior engineers placed for the long haul in high-risk areas, collaborating with product and infrastructure groups so features arrive in production in better shape. The principal shapes…
Job Description
Canva is hiring a Principal Production Engineer to help set the direction of Production Engineering across the company. The team blends software engineering with the toughest reliability challenges in Canva's infrastructure, supporting a product with roughly 240 million monthly active users. Principals are senior engineers placed for the long haul in high-risk areas, collaborating with product and infrastructure groups so features arrive in production in better shape.
The principal shapes the practice itself. Duties include setting the engagement model for how Production Engineering works with product and infrastructure teams, scoping projects, and defining what a clean handover looks like. The principal also personally drives the most technically demanding projects, such as sharding, multi-region design and JVM performance at scale, while others build expertise in neighbouring domains. The role establishes the technical standard for production engineers at Canva and decides how to pair senior and mid-level colleagues so each project teaches something.
Impact tracking is included, such as watching incident severity and duration trends and confirming that launches reach production without trouble. The posting asks for production reliability work in large distributed systems, experience leading or helping design an embedded model, and a record of staying close to the code at a senior level. Candidates should bring depth using Java, Go, Rust, C++ or another systems-level language, experience with partitioning, replication and consistency trade-offs, and the credibility to influence teams beyond their own. The role is marked on-site, and no city is named.
Responsibilities
- Define how Production Engineering partners with product and infrastructure teams, including scoping and handover
- Lead the hardest projects personally, such as sharding, multi-region architecture and JVM performance
- Set the bar for what a production engineer at Canva looks like
- Decide how to pair senior and mid-level colleagues and what each pairing should teach
- Engage engineering leaders so Production Engineering is involved before problems grow
- Define measures for incident trends and launch quality
Requirements
- Experience owning reliability across large distributed systems, including diagnosing failures and delivering lasting fixes
- Experience leading or shaping a function whose engineers work across team lines
- Staying hands-on at a senior level and being consulted on the hardest problems
- Technical judgement respected by teams outside your reporting line
- Depth using Java, Go, Rust, C++ or another systems-level language
- Practical experience with partitioning, replication, failure modes and consistency trade-offs
Qualifications
- Working knowledge of Linux internals such as process scheduling, memory handling, I/O and networking
- Familiarity with consensus, leader election, consistent hashing, backpressure and circuit breakers
- Experience building tracing, dashboards and alerting, and running Kubernetes in production
- Performance profiling experience and AWS production experience
- On-call and incident response experience
- Bonus: enterprise SaaS experience, JVM internals and GC tuning, or multi-region and sharding migrations
Core Skills
Benefits
- Equity
- Parental leave policy covering all parents and carers
- Yearly Vibe and Thrive allowance covering wellbeing, social activities and home-office setup
- Flexible leave options
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is the role based?
The listing is marked on-site, but no city is named.
What does the principal define?
The principal sets the engagement model, scopes projects and establishes the technical standard for the practice.
What experience is required?
The posting asks for production reliability work in large distributed systems and technical leadership in embedded models.
Is a salary stated?
No salary is stated.
Sample Interview Questions
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