Principal Production Engineer

About the role

Join Canva's Production Engineering team to shape reliability across a platform serving 240M monthly active users. As a Principal Production Engineer you will define engagement models, set technical standards and influence product readiness at scale.

Key responsibilities

• Define how Production Engineering pairs with product and infrastructure teams, scoping engagements and handoffs.
• Lead the most technically complex engagements, such as sharding, multi‑region architecture and JVM performance at scale.
• Set the technical bar for production engineers, establishing standards for credibility and hiring.
• Partner with engineering leadership to ensure production readiness is upstream of product work.
• Define and track metrics for incident severity, duration and clean feature launches.

Required profile

• Proven ownership of reliability for large‑scale distributed systems.
• Experience leading embedded engineering models across team boundaries.
• Hands‑on senior developer who is consulted for the hardest problems.
• Cross‑org influence with trusted technical judgement.

Required skills

• Deep experience with JVM, Go, Rust, C++ or comparable systems languages.
• Strong knowledge of Linux internals, process scheduling, memory, I/O and networking.
• Expertise in distributed systems concepts: sharding, replication, consistency, consensus, back‑pressure.
• Observability tooling: tracing, dashboards and alerting.
• Containerisation and orchestration with Kubernetes at production scale.
• Performance analysis and profiling of JVM or system‑level processes.
• Cloud infrastructure experience, particularly AWS.
• Incident response and on‑call experience.

What we offer

• Equity packages.
• Inclusive parental leave policy.
• Annual wellbeing allowance.
• Flexible leave options.