Description
Join the Production Engineering team at Canva, which sits at the intersection of software engineering and reliability problems in Canva's infrastructure.
The team focuses on finding and fixing the hardest problems in production, writing software that changes how production behaves, and ensuring that every team ships with more confidence.
As a Principal Production Engineer, you will define the engagement model for Production Engineering, lead the hardest engagements, set the technical bar, pair strategy across the team, connect to the product roadmap, build the measurement story, and compound at organisation scale.
Responsibilities:
- Define the engagement model for Production Engineering
- Lead the hardest engagements, taking personal ownership of technically complex areas
- Set the technical bar for production engineers at Canva
- Pair strategy across the team, deciding how staff and mid-level engineers are paired
- Connect to the product roadmap, working with engineering leadership to ensure Production Engineering is upstream of problems
- Build the measurement story, defining metrics and tracking progress
Requirements:
- Experience in production at scale, owning reliability in large-scale distributed systems
- Technical leadership in embedded models, leading or helping shape a function where engineers work across team boundaries
- Hands-on through seniority, staying close to the code and being consulted when problems are genuinely hard
- Cross-org influence, shaping how teams outside your own make technical decisions
- JVM or systems depth, building real things in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a comparable systems language at production scale
- Distributed systems in practice, navigating sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency tradeoffs
Technical knowledge:
- Linux internals, reasoning about process scheduling, memory, I/O, and the network stack
- Distributed systems, including consistent hashing, leader election, consensus, backpressure, circuit breakers
- Observability tooling, building tracing, dashboards, and alerting
- Containerisation and orchestration, Kubernetes in production
- Performance analysis, profiling JVM applications or systems-level processes
- Cloud infrastructure, AWS in production
- Incident response, being on-call and having opinions about what good looks like
Nice to have:
- Enterprise SaaS background, experience with production engineering in a similar context
- JVM internals, tuning GC and profiling threads in production
- Multi-region or sharding experience, involvement in a data store migration or multi-region architecture
Benefits:
- Equity packages
- Inclusive parental leave policy
- Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance
- Flexible leave options