Senior Production Engineering Manager

Role Overview

We welcome you to explore an exciting opportunity to lead the Embedded team within Production Engineering at Canva. This leadership role guides a team predominantly composed of senior engineers working on critical production challenges such as securing sensitive data, enhancing software change safety, increasing platform reliability through observability, and creating tools to bolster service resilience under heavy load.

The position requires a leader able to influence across organizational boundaries, earning trust to collaborate effectively with engineering leaders and steer technical decisions. As Embedded is a newly formed team, you will play a central role in defining its focus, engagement methods, success metrics, and culture.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and set strategic direction for a senior engineering team addressing vital production issues.
• Establish trust and productive partnerships with engineering leaders outside your formal reporting lines.
• Maintain technical involvement sufficient to assess and shape key decisions and assumptions.
• Define team objectives, engagement processes, and standards to maximize production engineering impact.
• Create a working environment promoting psychological safety, direct coaching, and growth opportunities for senior engineers.
• Develop frameworks to scale the Embedded team’s engagements while preserving technical excellence and collaborative quality.
• Drive adoption of reusable engineering practices and patterns from individual engagements across the organization.
• Mentor and cultivate future technical leaders to amplify the team’s influence.

Required Experience & Skills

• Proven leadership of senior software engineers through complex, often ambiguous technical challenges with high autonomy.
• Hands-on experience in software production environments where system reliability, scalability, and risk management are critical.
• Ability to earn authority and trust in environments that value influence over reporting hierarchy.
• Track record of managing cross-organizational technical initiatives, from problem definition to successful delivery.
• Effectiveness in encouraging teams to adopt new software engineering and operational practices, overcoming skepticism and inertia.
• Strong engineering leadership skills that foster open communication, feedback, and innovation.
• Solid foundation in computer science concepts including concurrency, multithreading, and data structures.
• Proficiency in at least one high-level programming language such as Go, Python, Java, or C++, to engage with design and implementation decisions.
• Comprehensive understanding of system internals, networking, and cloud platforms like AWS or GCP.
• Systems thinking aptitude: ability to navigate ambiguous, multi-component problems considering architecture and engineering design patterns.
• Familiarity with reliability engineering disciplines including observability, capacity management, and failure mode analysis in production systems.
• Experience operating in large-scale, high-criticality settings where reliability impacts directly affect users, systems, or business outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous management experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or related fields.
• Exposure to large distributed infrastructure domains such as large-scale storage, content delivery networks, or networking.
• Demonstrated ability to develop senior engineers and technical leads capable of coaching peers and managing complex projects.
• Experience contributing to the formation and evolution of a technical function’s identity, operations, or scope.

Organizational Context

The role is situated within Canva’s Reliability Platform subgroup, which forms part of the larger Infrastructure supergroup responsible for fidelity across computing, storage, networking, developer experience, and service reliability foundations. Production Engineering’s remit involves applying software engineering to solve operational reliability challenges in a rapidly growing environment with over 250 million active monthly users.

Production Engineering is divided into Embedded and Core teams. Embedded collaborates closely and directly with multiple teams on specific, ongoing engineering challenges, emphasizing senior technical leadership, while Core focuses on universal production engineering capabilities spanning teams. The Embedded team’s culture values senior expertise and adaptability as they engage with complex systems and evolve the function’s impact and practices.

Benefits

• Equity participation aligning your success with Canva’s growth.
• A progressive parental leave policy supporting all types of parents and carers.
• An annual allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, and workplace setup.
• Flexible leave policies enabling personal recharging and contribution to causes important to you.

Additional Information

Canva embraces AI as a creativity and technology enabler, integrating interactive challenges involving AI tools into the recruitment process. We value diverse skills and backgrounds and encourage all interested candidates to apply regardless of precise alignment with listed experience.

Interviews are conducted virtually. Applicants are invited to share their preferred pronouns and request reasonable accommodations as needed to ensure an inclusive hiring experience.