Staff Production Engineer (Distributed Systems)

TL;DR

Staff Production Engineer (Distributed Systems): Building and optimizing high-scale production infrastructure for Canva's platform with an accent on reliability, distributed systems, and system-level performance. Focus on sharding core data stores, reducing incident severity, and creating shared platform capabilities to support 240M MAUs.

Location: Adelaide, Australia

Company

Canva is a global design platform redefining how the world experiences design.

What you will do

• Own high-risk technical domains, including sharding core data stores and optimizing resource utilization.
• Write production software to instrument, refactor, and rebuild components causing issues at scale.
• Partner closely with product teams to shape roadmaps and ensure production reliability before problems compound.
• Develop shared platform capabilities to seed scalability across the organization.
• Mentor and pair with fellow production engineers to improve system resilience.
• Drive metrics for fewer incidents, faster recovery, and lower latency to improve customer experience.

Requirements

• Must be based in Adelaide, Australia
• Proven experience owning reliability within large-scale distributed systems.
• Commercial depth in JVM languages (Java), Go, Rust, C++, or comparable systems languages.
• Deep knowledge of Linux internals, networking stacks, and distributed systems patterns (consistent hashing, consensus, circuit breakers).
• Experience with Kubernetes and AWS at production scale.
• Proficiency in observability tooling and incident response in serious production environments.

Nice to have

• Enterprise SaaS background in a high-scale organization.
• Deep JVM internals knowledge, including GC tuning and thread profiling in production.
• Experience with multi-region architecture or large-scale data store migrations.
• Practical experience with eBPF or kernel instrumentation.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity packages to share in the company's success.
• Inclusive parental leave policy for all parents and carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, social connection, and office setup.
• Flexible leave options to recharge and support personal needs.
• Virtual hiring process for convenience.