Senior Production Engineering Manager

Job Overview

Join Canva as Senior Production Engineering Manager leading the Embedded team, one of two in the Production Engineering division. This team focuses on solving critical production challenges such as data protection, safer software changes, enhancing reliability and observability in major platform rewrites, and developing tooling to increase system resilience during overload scenarios.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead a highly skilled group of predominantly senior engineers across multiple high-priority production projects.
• Establish trust and influence across engineering leaders beyond direct reports to guide technical decisions and organizational collaboration.
• Define the team's strategic focus, operational methods, success metrics, and overall impact of Production Engineering efforts.
• Create a constructive environment fostering psychological safety, providing coaching, and nurturing senior engineers' growth in technical and leadership capacities.
• Develop frameworks to scale the team’s engagements without compromising technical excellence or quality of mentorship.
• Translate individual project learnings into reusable engineering standards and practices benefiting the broader organization.
• Mentor and support the development of future leaders and engagement leads to expand the team's overall influence and effectiveness.

Candidate Profile

• Proven leadership managing senior software engineers and technical leads through complex, ambiguous projects with significant autonomy.
• Experience working in environments with high expectations for software reliability, scalability, and production risk management.
• Adept at building trust through influence rather than formal authority across different organizational levels.
• Track record of delivering cross-organizational technical initiatives from inception through execution.
• Skilled in motivating teams to adopt new engineering or operational practices, even when met with resistance or existing entrenched methods.
• Strong communication skills capable of discussing complex technical trade-offs with executive stakeholders while fostering an open and challenging engineering culture.

Technical Expertise

• Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, and data structures.
• Proficiency or meaningful experience with programming languages such as Go, Python, Java, or C++ for engaging in design and implementation decisions.
• In-depth knowledge of system internals, networking, and cloud platforms like AWS or GCP.
• Exceptional systems thinking abilities to navigate intricate and ambiguous problems involving multiple components and constraints.
• Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts including observability, capacity planning, failure modes, and operational characteristics of production systems.
• Experience supporting large-scale or critical systems where reliability failures impact users, infrastructure, or the business substantially.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous leadership in SRE, Production Engineering, or related functions.
• Experience with extensive infrastructure such as large-scale storage, CDN, networking, or distributed systems.
• History of mentoring senior engineers to evolve into technical leaders capable of coaching others and managing complex projects.
• Participation in defining the structure, goals, or scope of emerging technical functions.

About the Team

The Production Engineering team is integral to Canva’s Reliability Platform group within the Infra supergroup, supporting foundational infrastructure including compute, storage, and networking. The team balances software engineering with operational excellence and focuses on collaboration across teams to maintain Canva’s high reliability as the user base grows beyond 250 million monthly active users. Production Engineering splits into Embedded and Core teams; Embedded works alongside various teams on long-term projects, emphasizing senior technical leadership and knowledge transfer.

Benefits and Culture

• Equity grants aligning your success with Canva’s growth.
• Inclusive parental leave that supports all caregivers.
• Annual allowance to support wellbeing, social involvement, and workspace setup.
• Flexible leave policies encouraging work-life balance and personal recharge.

Recruitment Process and Additional Information

Interviews are conducted virtually. Canva values diversity, encourages candidates from all backgrounds, and emphasizes skills and cultural fit over exact match in requirements. The hiring process may include AI-based technical challenges reflecting real work scenarios.

Please share your pronouns and any accessibility requirements during application to support a fair and inclusive interview experience.