Senior Software Engineer (Reliability Foundations) at Canva

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Designing, building, and improving large-scale production systems that are scalable, reliable, and maintainable
• Working in different ways depending on the need—embed with teams, build shared platform capabilities, or partner on cross-cutting initiatives—to improve system quality
• Jumping into partner team codebases and shared systems to ship meaningful improvements to production services
• Owning the outcome for each piece of work—help shape the solution and drive it through to implementation
• Partnering with multiple teams to find and fix systemic issues in distributed systems—scaling limits, cascading failures, performance bottlenecks, and fault tolerance gaps
• Leading investigations into production issues, then turn what you learn into concrete improvements with the teams who own the systems
• Making sure improvements get adopted and can be sustained by the teams who own the systems long-term
• Mentoring engineers in our team and help partner teams strengthen their engineering practices
• Making pragmatic trade-offs that balance reliability, performance, and product velocity
• Helping set technical direction through design discussions, code reviews, and hands-on contributions
• When it makes sense, build shared components or libraries that help improvements scale across services

You're probably a match if:

• You have 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and building large-scale, production-facing systems
• Strong backend engineering experience (Java preferred but also Python or Golang), and you can work across the stack when needed
• Proven ability to improve the quality, scalability, and reliability of real-world systems through hands-on engineering
• Experience contributing to system design and architecture in distributed systems
• Ability to diagnose and resolve complex issues in production environments
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers within a team
• Strong communication and collaboration skills—you can work effectively with multiple teams
• Disciplined coding practices, including code reviews, testing, and maintainable system design

It’s nice to have the following experience as well.

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems and microservice architectures (e.g. in AWS or similar environments)
• Familiarity with observability (metrics, logs, tracing) and using it to debug and improve systems
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, libraries, or internal tooling
• Experience with data platforms or analytics tooling like Snowflake, Mode Analytics, or Looker

About the team

The Reliability Foundations team works side-by-side with product and platform engineering teams to spot, prioritise, and solve the most important reliability challenges in production. We use what we learn from incidents, production health, and real system behaviour to build reliability capabilities—and to improve how services get designed, built, and run.

This isn’t a typical product engineering role. You’ll work across multiple systems and teams, rather than being tied to a single service or roadmap. Your focus will be high-impact improvements to quality, scalability, and reliability across Canva’s platform.

We choose the right way to work based on the problem. Sometimes you’ll embed with a team and ship improvements directly in their systems. Other times, you’ll build shared platform capabilities, or help teams turn a great solution into something others can reuse.

Our goal is simple: deliver meaningful, lasting improvements. We stay flexible and pick the approach that will make the biggest difference.

We usually define and prioritise work with senior engineers and technical leads, and we agree on clear goals and what “success” looks like upfront. The work is time-bound, so you can focus on delivering outcomes without any confusion about long-term ownership.

This role isn’t traditional SRE or pure infrastructure work. You’ll work directly in production systems, contribute to real codebases, and solve real problems alongside engineering teams.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva. We’re evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience - you’ll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect. We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture.

When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva, so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.