Principal Production Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Australia.

📋 Description

• Become a part of the team that is transforming the way the world perceives design.

• The Production Engineering team operates at the crossroads of software engineering and the most challenging reliability issues within Canva's infrastructure.

• Develop software that alters production behavior. When it functions effectively, every team can deliver with greater assurance, making Canva faster and more resilient for daily users.

• The strategic initiative involves a completely different paradigm. It represents Canva's unique perspective on production reliability, tailored to our working methods.

• Not about operationalizing systems or managing alerts, but about crafting software that modifies production behavior.

• Leading the most challenging assignments: Taking personal responsibility for the most technically intricate areas, such as sharding, multi-region architecture, and JVM performance at scale, while the team gains expertise in related domains.

• Establishing the technical standard: Defining what it means to be a production engineer at Canva, setting the benchmark for technical credibility, and forming the model against which future hiring will be evaluated.

• Collaborating on strategy across the team: Determining how staff and mid-level engineers are paired and what they should learn from each engagement.

• Crafting the measurement narrative: Monitoring the decline in incident severity and duration, ensuring clean feature launches in production. You will define the metrics and how they are tracked.

⛳️ Requirements

• Experience in Production at scale: You have been responsible for reliability in large-scale distributed systems. When issues arose, you investigated and implemented enduring solutions.

• Technical leadership in embedded models: You have led or contributed to a function where engineers collaborate across team boundaries rather than being confined to a single team. You understand what drives success in that model and what causes it to fail.

• Hands-on through seniority: You have remained close to the code. At this level, you are the engineer others consult when they encounter genuinely difficult problems.

• Cross-org influence: You have impacted how external teams make technical decisions due to your trusted technical judgment.

• JVM or systems expertise: You have developed significant projects in Java, Go, Rust, C++, or a similar systems language at production scale. Depth of knowledge is more important than the specific language.

• Practical experience with distributed systems: You have dealt with sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency trade-offs in a production setting.

• Technical knowledge of Linux internals: You can analyze process scheduling, memory, I/O, and the network stack when a system deviates from expected behavior.

• Distributed systems: You have navigated sharding, replication, failure modes, and consistency trade-offs in production, including consistent hashing, leader election, consensus, backpressure, and circuit breakers.

• Observability tooling: You have created tracing, dashboards, and alerting systems that inform you of issues.

• Containerization and orchestration: Experience with Kubernetes in production, particularly at the scheduler level.

• Performance analysis: You have profiled JVM applications or systems-level processes and rectified any identified issues.

• Cloud infrastructure: Experience with AWS in a production environment, handling relevant failure modes at scale.

• Incident response: You have been on-call and possess insights into what constitutes excellence in this area.

• Nice to have Enterprise SaaS background: You have performed similar work in an organization recognized for excellence in this field, understanding the true implications of 'production engineering' beyond just a job title.

• JVM internals: You have optimized garbage collection and profiled threads in a production environment.

• Multi-region or sharding experience: You have participated in a data store migration or multi-region architecture where errors were not an option.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity packages — we aim for our success to align with yours.

• An inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and caregivers.

• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance designed to enhance your wellbeing, social connections, office setup, and more.

• Flexible leave options that empower you to make a positive impact, take time to recharge, and support your personal needs.