Production Engineering Manager

About the Role

Join Canva as a Production Engineering Manager leading the Embedded team, part of the Production Engineering function. This position centers on guiding a skilled team of senior engineers tackling key production challenges such as safeguarding critical data, enhancing software change safety, improving reliability and observability during major platform rewrites, and creating tools to boost resilience against overload.

This role requires strong influence across teams without direct reporting lines, necessitating quick trust-building with other engineering leaders. You will help your engineers navigate diverse technical and organizational landscapes while remaining involved enough to positively affect technical decisions. Embedded is a forming team where you will co-create the team's objectives, engagement methods, success metrics, and overall impact model.

Your leadership will foster an environment conducive to top performance by senior engineers through clear direction, psychological safety, direct coaching, and support for expanding technical and organizational leadership skills.

Key Focus Areas

• Maximize Embedded's impact on critical production issues, build strategic trust for early team involvement, and quantify success with measurable outcomes.
• Create a scalable engagement model maintaining technical excellence, coaching quality, and strong partnerships.
• Develop reusable engineering standards, practices, and capabilities that benefit multiple teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and engagement leads to grow their coaching abilities and capacity for managing complex tasks, magnifying team effectiveness.

Candidate Profile

Ideal candidates possess several of the following qualifications, though meeting all is not mandatory. Canva supports your growth if you join.

• Leadership of senior engineers and technical leads through complex or ambiguous projects, with expertise in coaching highly autonomous professionals.
• Experience in software environments emphasizing reliability, scalability, and minimizing production risks.
• Proven ability to build trust and authority primarily through influence rather than formal reporting lines.
• Managing cross-organization technical initiatives from analysis through delivery.
• Effecting team adoption of new software development or operational methods despite resistance or established practices.
• Engineering leadership demonstrated through clear technical communication to senior stakeholders and fostering a culture of constructive challenge, learning, and feedback.

Technical Knowledge Required

• Thorough understanding of computer science basics including concurrency, multithreading, and data structures.
• Proficiency in languages such as Go, Python, Java, or C++ sufficient to effectively evaluate design, implementation, and trade-offs.
• Strong grasp of system internals, networking, and cloud platforms like AWS or GCP.
• Ability to apply systems thinking to solve ambiguous challenges across components, teams, and constraints with sound architecting skills.
• Experience with reliability engineering concepts including observability, capacity planning, failure modes, and operating characteristics of production systems.
• Operated in high-scale or critical systems where downtime or failures impact users, infrastructure, or business substantially.

Preferred Additional Experience

• Prior leadership in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or related technical management roles.
• Exposure to extensive infrastructure domains such as large-scale storage, content delivery networks, networking, or distributed infrastructure.
• History of cultivating senior technical talent capable of coaching peers and managing growing complexity.
• Experience shaping or founding a technical function with evolving identity and operational models.

Team Context

Production Engineering is part of Canva’s Reliability Platform subgroup within the broader Infrastructure group responsible for foundational technology including compute, storage, networking, developer tools, and reliability.

Canva’s 250+ million monthly users pose complex reliability challenges that cross multiple systems and teams. Production Engineering addresses these by solving operational issues through software engineering rather than administrative processes.

The function divides into two teams: Embedded, which partners closely with other engineering teams on specific engagements; and Core, which develops cross-cutting services and capabilities to amplify lessons learned into shared benefits.

Benefits

• Equity participation to share in company success.
• Inclusive parental leave policies for all parents and carers.
• Annual allowance to promote wellbeing, social activity, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options to encourage personal renewal and support.

Other Information

Canva embraces artificial intelligence as a creativity and technology enhancer; interview processes may include AI-based problem solving reflective of real work scenarios.

Hiring decisions prioritize experience, skills, enthusiasm, and potential cultural contributions. Applicants are encouraged to disclose pronouns and request accommodations as needed.

Interviews are conducted virtually.