{"id":507305,"url":"https://alion.io/job/canva-principal-production-engineer-5","title":"Principal Production Engineer","company":{"id":181,"name":"Canva","domain":"canva.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/canva","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":37,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Brisbane, Australia"],"countries":["AU"],"hiring_countries":["AU"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":114000,"max_usd":317000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1037},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Canva","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-09-06T23:07:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T07:14:08Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-10-29T07:14:08Z","days_open":52,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":52},"description":"Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.\nHey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!\nThanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.\nWhat you'd be doing in this role\nThe Production Engineering team sits at the intersection of software engineering and the hardest reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure. At 240M MAUs, the hardest problems aren't on any product roadmap. Production Engineering exists to find them first and fix them properly. Writing software. Changing how production behaves. When it works, every team ships with more confidence and Canva gets faster and more resilient for the people who use it every day.\nThe strategic bet is a different model entirely. Canva's own take on what production reliability looks like, built for how we work. Senior software engineers 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. Not operationalising systems. Not running alerts. Writing software that changes how production behaves.\nThe engineers who do this work well have gone deep in systems most people only operate. They can walk into a codebase they didn't write, understand what's actually happening at scale, win the technical respect of the team they're embedded with, and then bend the software to make it more reliable, more efficient, and more resilient.\nAt Principal level, you're also the person who defines what this practice looks like at Canva. The calibration anchor for every hire, every engagement, and every standard the team sets.\nAt the moment, this role is focused on:\nDefining the engagement model: How Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, how engagements are scoped, and what handoff actually looks like. This model is new. You're shaping it.\n\nLeading 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.\n\nSetting 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.\n\nPairing strategy across the team: Deciding how staff and mid-level engineers are paired and what they should be learning from each engagement. Growing production engineering capability across the org, not just within the team.\n\nConnecting to the product roadmap: Working with engineering leadership across Canva to ensure Production Engineering is upstream of problems, not downstream. Influencing how product teams think about production readiness before they ship.\n\nBuilding the measurement story: Incident severity and duration trending down. Feature launches going to production cleanly. You define what the metrics are and how they're tracked.\n\nCompounding at organisation scale: One well-placed Production Engineering engagement changes how engineers build for years. At Principal level, your leverage is the sum of all those engagements, plus the standard you set for how each one runs.\n\nWhat success looks like: As a secondee, developing trusted relationship with your team. Guiding them towards, shipping at velocity, with more confidence and less toil.\n\nYou’re probably a match\nWe'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.\nExperience\nProduction at scale: You've owned reliability in large-scale distributed systems. When things went brake, you investigate how and shipped the solution that lasts forever.\nTechnical leadership in embedded models: You've led or helped shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries rather than within a single one. You know what makes that model work and what makes it fail.\n\nHands-on through seniority: You've stayed close to the code. At this level, you're the engineer others consult when the problem is genuinely hard.\n\nCross-org influence: You've shaped how teams outside your own make technical decisions because your technical judgement is trusted.\n\nJVM or systems depth: You've built real things in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language at production scale. Language matters less than depth.\n\nDistributed systems in practice: You've navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency tradeoffs in production.\n\nTechnical knowledge\nLinux internals: You can reason about process scheduling, memory, I/O, and the network stack when a system misbehaves.\nDistributed systems: You've navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency tradeoffs in production. As well as consistent hashing, leader election, consensus, backpressure, circuit breakers\n\nObservability tooling: You've built the tracing, dashboards, and alerting that tells you what's wrong.\n\nContainerisation and orchestration: Kubernetes in production, at the scheduler level.\n\nPerformance analysis: You've profiled JVM applications or systems-level processes and fixed what you found.\n\nCloud infrastructure: AWS in production, across the failure modes that matter at scale.\n\nIncident response: You've been on-call and have opinions about what good looks like.\n\nNice to have\nEnterprise SaaS background: You've done this specific kind of work at an org that's done it well. You know what \"production engineering\" means when it's not just a job title.\n\nJVM internals: You've tuned GC and profiled threads in production.\n\nMulti-region or sharding experience: You've been involved in a data store migration or multi-region architecture where getting it wrong was not an option.\n\nAbout the Group and Team\nJoin the Production Engineering Group at Canva, where our mission is to make every system that powers Canva fast, reliable, and ready for the next scale. Infra owns the infrastructure layer that every other team builds on: compute, storage, networking, developer experience, and reliability.\nThe Reliability Platform subgroup is where Canva thinks seriously about the technical risk that comes with operating at hundreds of millions of users. It's a group with broad scope, from the tooling that helps teams run incidents well, to the engineering work that stops incidents from happening in the first place.\nProduction Engineering sits within Reliability Platform. A small team of senior software engineers embedded in Canva's highest-risk technical areas, working alongside the product and infrastructure teams who own those systems for a long-term engagements. When it works, other teams ship more confidently and the incidents that do happen resolve faster and hurt less.\nWhat’s in it for you?\nAchieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.\nHere's a taste of what's on offer:\nEquity packages - we want our success to be yours too\nInclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers\n\nAn annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more\n\nFlexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally\n\nOther stuff to know?\nWe see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We're evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience, you'll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side.\nWe make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.\nWhen you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva, so even if you don't feel like your skills quite match what's listed above - we still want to hear from you!\nPlease note that interviews are conducted virtually.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8402,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Equity","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Australia","iso":"AU","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Graphic Design","Design & Prototyping Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-07T12:35:43Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-29T07:14:08Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":null,"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/canva-principal-production-engineer-5","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/canva-principal-production-engineer-5.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T23:07:08Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14235,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":181},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=181"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcanva-principal-production-engineer-5"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcanva-principal-production-engineer-5"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcanva-principal-production-engineer-5"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/canva-principal-production-engineer-5\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcanva-principal-production-engineer-5"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":507305}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"canva.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":507305},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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