Principal Production Engineer — Shape Production Reliability

Canva; Sydney; On-site; AUD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Inclusive parental leave policy

Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

Canva is seeking a Senior Principal Production Engineer embedded in the Production Engineering Group to drive reliability at scale across multi-region systems. You’ll shape engagement models, set technical standards, and mentor engineers while partnering with product and infrastructure teams to reduce incidents and improve performance.

You’ll lead the hardest reliability challenges, from sharding and JVM performance to cross-org influence, ensuring Canva's services stay fast, resilient, and

Qualifications

• Leadership in large-scale distributed systems reliability.
• Hands-on with production-grade software and complex architectures.
• Strong knowledge of JVM performance and system tuning.
• Ability to influence cross-team decisions and roadmaps.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Proven incident response and post-mortem practices.

Responsibilities

• Define the engagement model between production engineering and product/infrastructure teams.
• Lead the hardest engagements: multi-region architecture, sharding, JVM performance.
• Set technical bar and create standards for Canva's production engineering practice.
• Pair staff and mid-level engineers; scale capability across the org.
• Collaborate with leadership to be upstream of problems and influence product roadmaps.
• Define and track incident severity metrics and improve production readiness.

Skills

Linux internals

Distributed systems

Observability

Incident response

JVM depth

Multi-region systems

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Java

Go

C++

Job description

Canva is seeking a Senior Principal Production Engineer embedded in the Production Engineering Group to drive reliability at scale across multi-region systems. You’ll shape engagement models, set technical standards, and mentor engineers while partnering with product and infrastructure teams to reduce incidents and improve performance.

You’ll lead the hardest reliability challenges, from sharding and JVM performance to cross-org influence, ensuring Canva's services stay fast, resilient, and