Production Engineering Manager

Job Description

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks 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.

What you'd be doing in this role

This role leads Core, one of Production Engineering's two teams.

You'll lead a team of software engineers who own Production Engineering's services and take on broader engineering problems that cut across multiple teams and groups. Core complements our Embedded team: where Embedded tackles targeted problems inside other parts of Canva, Core can take the strongest ideas and turn them into capability that works more broadly across the organisation.

Your job is to help the team turn complex, sometimes loosely defined problems into focused engineering goals and get them delivered. You'll stay close enough to the technical work to challenge assumptions, understand trade-offs and help engineers make strong decisions, while giving them the autonomy to own the detail.

Core is still taking shape. Several in flight projects have carried over from Reliability Foundations, and as those roll off through the rest of the year, you'll help define the team's next phase by setting its focus, priorities and the problems Core takes on next. You'll also help shape how initiatives are structured and measured, and turn lessons from individual pieces of work into capability with broader reach and impact across Canva.

You'll also own the day-to-day health of the team: setting clear priorities, coaching engineers directly, creating psychological safety and helping their team develop organisational fluency and influence.

Looking ahead, this role will help build:

• Reliable services at scale: Help Core's services and capabilities keep pace as Production Engineering grows and more teams come to depend on their skills and expertise.

• Standards worth reusing: Turn lessons from individual problems and engagements into engineering practices and capabilities that can be applied more broadly.

• A strong Core–Embedded loop: Build the feedback loops that let targeted learning from Embedded become reusable capability through Core.

• Growing engineering depth: Coach engineers to take on increasingly complex technical and cross-team problems as Core's scope grows.

You’re probably a match

We'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.

Experience

• Leading engineers: You've led software engineers through complex or ambiguous technical work and know how to coach people to grow their skills and autonomy.

• Production exposure: You've worked in software environments where reliability, scalability and production risk genuinely mattered.

• Delivery ownership: You've taken significant technical initiatives from understanding the problem through to delivery, including work spanning multiple teams.

• Driving adoption: You've helped teams adopt new tools, practices or ways of working, even when they were busy or already had an established approach.

• Engineering leadership: You can communicate technical trade-offs clearly, set direction without prescribing every decision, and create an environment where engineers can challenge ideas, learn and do their best work.

Technical knowledge

• CS fundamentals: A strong grounding in computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading and data structures.

• Language depth: Enough depth in languages such as Go, Python, Java or C++ to engage meaningfully with designs, implementation choices and technical trade-offs.

• Systems knowledge: Strong working knowledge of system internals, networking and cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.

• Systems thinking: Comfortable reasoning through ambiguous problems spanning multiple components and constraints, with a strong understanding of system design, architecture and engineering patterns.

• Reliability engineering: Familiarity with observability, capacity, failure modes and the operational characteristics of production systems.

• Scale and criticality: Experience working in large-scale or high-criticality environments where reliability failures have meaningful consequences for users, systems or the business.

Nice to have

• SRE/PE management: Prior experience leading Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering or a closely related function.

• Infrastructure exposure: Experience with large-scale storage, CDN, networking or distributed infrastructure.

• Growing technical leaders: A history of developing engineers who can coach others and take on increasingly complex work.

• Function-building: Experience helping shape the scope, ways of working or identity of a technical team while it was still evolving.

About the Group and Team

Production Engineering sits within Canva's Reliability Platform subgroup, part of the wider Infra supergroup responsible for the foundations Canva's engineering teams build on, including compute, storage, networking, developer experience and reliability.

At more than 250 million monthly active users, Canva's hardest reliability problems increasingly span systems, teams and organisational boundaries. Production Engineering exists to help keep Canva reliable, efficient and predictable as that complexity grows.

It's primarily a software engineering function. Rather than operating systems from the sidelines or papering over problems with process, Production Engineers solve operational challenges through design and code.

The function is split into two teams: Embedded and Core.

Embedded works directly alongside teams across Canva on targeted, long-running engineering engagements. Engineers typically work in small groups, bringing Production Engineering expertise directly into some of Canva's most important technical problem spaces.

Core owns Production Engineering's services and works on broader, more federated problems that span multiple groups. Sometimes work discovered through an Embedded engagement comes back into Core, where the teams can work together to turn a targeted solution into capability that benefits more of Canva.

Core is designed to operate as a larger, more focused team than the distributed Embedded model, with a smaller number of shared goals and a strong emphasis on engineering execution.

Because Production Engineering is still taking shape, both teams are helping define what the function becomes: where it can have the greatest impact, how it partners with other teams, and how individual wins become lasting engineering capability across Canva.

What’s in it for you?

Achieving 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.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages — we want our success to be yours too

• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers

• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more

• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and support you personally

Other stuff to know?

We 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.

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.

When 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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.