Senior Production Engineering Manager

Role Overview

Join Canva as a Senior Production Engineering Manager leading the Embedded team, a key group within Production Engineering. This team is composed mainly of senior engineers addressing critical production challenges such as safeguarding essential data, enhancing software change safety, improving a major platform rewrite's reliability and observability, and developing tools and frameworks to boost service resilience under overload conditions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and support highly skilled engineering professionals across multiple technical challenges.
• Build collaborative relationships and influence engineering leaders across different teams to navigate complex technical and organizational landscapes.
• Shape the team's focus, defining priorities and success metrics for Production Engineering impact.
• Create an environment fostering technical excellence, psychological safety, and ongoing growth for senior engineers and technical leads.
• Develop models for scaling effective technical engagements, converting lessons into reusable engineering practices, and nurturing future technical leaders.

Experience and Skills Required

• Demonstrated leadership of senior and autonomous software engineers through complex projects.
• Experience in production environments prioritizing reliability, scalability, and risk management.
• Ability to quickly build trust and influence across organizational boundaries without relying solely on authority.
• Proven track record managing technical initiatives spanning multiple teams from problem identification to delivery.
• Skill in encouraging adoption of new practices among teams, even those with existing processes.
• Strong communication skills to convey complex technical trade-offs and foster a culture of learning and feedback.
• Solid foundation in computer science fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, and data structures.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Go, Python, Java, or C++ with capacity to engage in technical design and decisions.
• Comprehensive understanding of system internals, networking, cloud platforms like AWS or GCP.
• Systems thinking with ability to solve ambiguous problems involving multiple components and constraints.
• Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts including observability, capacity planning, failure modes, and operational aspects of production systems.
• Experience in large-scale or critical environments where system reliability substantially impacts users and business outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in managing Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or similar functions.
• Knowledge of large-scale infrastructure such as storage, CDNs, networking, or distributed systems.
• Proven ability to develop senior engineers and technical leads capable of coaching and handling complex challenges independently.
• Experience contributing to the definition and shaping of a technical function or team identity.

About the Team

Production Engineering is part of Canva’s Reliability Platform subgroup within the Infrastructure supergroup. The function aids in ensuring Canva’s reliability and efficiency across systems supporting over 250 million monthly active users. The Production Engineering function is divided into Embedded and Core teams, with Embedded working alongside various teams on targeted projects and focused on senior technical expertise.

Benefits

• Equity participation to share in Canva's success.
• Inclusive parental leave policies accommodating all parents and carers.
• Annual allowance supporting well-being, social connection, and office needs.
• Flexible leave options encouraging work-life balance and personal growth.

Additional Information

Canva values diversity and inclusion, encouraging applicants to share their pronouns and any interview accommodation needs. The hiring process places emphasis on candidates’ experience, skills, and cultural contribution. Note that interviews are conducted virtually. In light of evolving AI integration, some assessments may include work with AI tools to evaluate problem-solving and technological adaptability.