Senior Production Engineering Manager

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.