Opportunity at
CanvaStaff Production Engineer
Canva is hiring a Staff Production Engineer to tackle some of the hardest reliability problems in its infrastructure. The Production Engineering team blends software engineering with…
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About This Role
Canva is hiring a Staff Production Engineer to tackle some of the hardest reliability problems in its infrastructure. The Production Engineering team blends software engineering with reliability work for a product serving about 240 million monthly active users. Staff engineers are senior developers placed for the long term in the riskiest technical areas, working side by side with the product teams that own them. The role takes long-term responsibility for…
Job Description
Canva is hiring a Staff Production Engineer to tackle some of the hardest reliability problems in its infrastructure. The Production Engineering team blends software engineering with reliability work for a product serving about 240 million monthly active users. Staff engineers are senior developers placed for the long term in the riskiest technical areas, working side by side with the product teams that own them.
The role takes long-term responsibility for an engagement area such as sharding core data stores, managing resource consumption, or handling distributed-systems problems at scale. The engineer changes production behaviour by writing and refactoring code, adding instrumentation, and rebuilding the components that cause trouble. The work also includes pairing with and mentoring other production engineers and contributing shared capabilities that other teams can adopt beyond the project.
Success means fewer incidents, quicker recovery, lower severity levels and better latency, along with a trusted working relationship with the embedded team. The posting seeks experience owning reliability work in large distributed systems, past embedded delivery alongside a product team, strong depth across Java, Go, Rust, C++ or similar languages, and the knack for entering an unfamiliar codebase and fixing the root problem. No office city is named, and the role is marked on-site.
Responsibilities
- Take long-term ownership of a high-risk area such as core data store sharding or resource management
- Write and refactor production code to make systems more dependable and efficient
- Add instrumentation and rebuild the components that cause problems at scale
- Pair with and mentor fellow production engineers
- Bring recurring patterns back as shared platform capabilities
- Help the embedded team ship with more confidence and less operational toil
Requirements
- Experience owning reliability work in large distributed systems
- Experience embedded within, or working side by side with, a product group
- Production-grade depth using Java, Go, Rust, C++ or another systems language
- Hands-on knowledge of partitioning, replication, failure modes and consistency trade-offs
- Ability to enter an unfamiliar codebase, orient fast, locate the real issue and fix it
- Record of improving systems through technical credibility and trust rather than formal authority
Qualifications
- Working grasp of networking stacks and how traffic behaves at scale
- Linux internals such as scheduling, memory management, I/O and networking
- Familiarity with the usual distributed-systems toolkit, covering hash partitioning, leader elections, consensus, backpressure and circuit breakers
- Observability work with tracing, dashboards, alerting and SLOs
- Kubernetes at production scale and AWS in production
- Nice to have: enterprise SaaS experience, JVM garbage-collection tuning, multi-region or sharding migration work, or eBPF and kernel instrumentation
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.
How does the engagement model work?
Staff engineers are placed long term with the product team that owns a high-risk area and write production code alongside it.
How are candidates assessed?
The posting says some interviews include interactive, real-time challenges, and candidates may need to tackle a task with an AI tool.
Is a salary stated?
No salary is stated.
Sample Interview Questions
AI-generated questions tailored to this specific role — a preview of the full practice set.
