Senior 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 Engineering Manager role leads Embedded, one of Production Engineering's two teams.

You'll lead a technically strong group of engineers, deliberately weighted toward senior talent, working simultaneously across several of Canva's most important production challenges. Right now, those engagements include safeguarding critical data, making software changes safer, building reliability and observability into a major platform rewrite, and building tooling and frameworks to allow services to increase resilience to overload scenarios.

Because Embedded works alongside teams outside your reporting line, the role depends as much on influence as authority. You'll need to earn the trust of engineering leaders quickly, help your engineers navigate different technical and organisational environments, and stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions and shape important technical decisions.

Embedded is still new, so you won't be stepping into a finished playbook. You'll help decide which problems the team takes on, how engagements should work, what great looks like, and how we measure whether Production Engineering is having the impact we intended.

You'll also be responsible for creating an environment where experienced engineers can do their best work: setting direction, building psychological safety, giving direct coaching and helping senior engineers grow their technical and organisational influence.

Looking ahead, this role will help build:

• Impact where it matters most: Focus Embedded on the production problems where it can make the biggest difference, build trust with engineering leaders so the team is brought in early, and make that impact visible through measurable outcomes.

• A model that scales: Work out how Embedded can run more engagements without losing the technical bar, coaching quality or close partnerships that make the model effective.

• Standards worth reusing: Turn lessons from individual engagements into engineering practices, patterns and capabilities that can benefit teams across Canva.

• The next generation of leaders: Develop senior engineers and engagement leads who can coach others, lead increasingly complex work and multiply the team's impact.

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 senior engineers: You've led highly experienced software engineers and technical leads through complex or ambiguous work, and know how to coach people operating with significant autonomy.

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

• Earned authority: You've built trust from a standing start, particularly in environments where influence mattered more than reporting lines.

• Cross-org delivery: You've led significant technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or groups, from understanding the problem through to delivering an outcome.

• Driving adoption: You've persuaded teams to change how they build or operate software, even when they were busy, skeptical or already had an established way of working.

• Engineering leadership: You can communicate complex technical trade-offs to senior stakeholders while creating an environment where engineers can challenge ideas, learn, receive direct feedback 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, teams 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 senior engineers and technical leads who can coach others and take on increasingly complex work

• Function-building: Experience helping define the identity, operating model or scope of a technical function while it was still taking shape

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, combining senior technical leadership with engineers who can learn from the engagement and help carry that knowledge forward.

Core owns Production Engineering services and works on broader problems that cut across multiple teams or groups. When an Embedded engagement uncovers an idea worth applying more widely, Embedded and Core can work together to turn that learning into reusable capability across Canva.

Embedded is deliberately weighted toward senior technical talent. Production Engineers need to enter unfamiliar problem spaces, understand complex systems quickly and earn credibility with the engineers who already own them.

Because the function is still taking shape, the team is also defining its own identity: where Production Engineering 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.