Senior Software Engineer

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:

• Writing production-grade software in Python, Go, or Java - your primary focus will be solving reliability challenges through code.
• Working with product engineering teams to ensure reliability best practices and tools are rolled out in every service across the whole organisation. It's not enough to create a new throttling library; we want to make sure it's successfully used in every service.
• Leading deep-dive investigations into high-severity production incidents and writing code to prevent recurrence at scale.
• Fostering a culture within Engineering that puts reliability first and establishes processes and policies that drive reliability within product engineering teams. This includes things like SLAs, error budgets, on-call response, incident resolution, and observability best practices.
• Designing and building scalable backend systems, libraries and frameworks to improve the reliability of Canva's product architecture
• Shaping Canva's reliability roadmap by identifying gaps, proposing new approaches, and leading implementation end-to-end.

You're probably a match if

• You're a software engineer first - with deep experience writing clean, maintainable, production-grade code in Python, Java, or Go. 
• You've built and maintained large-scale, distributed systems - ideally user-facing apps with millions of users.
• You understand and enjoy tackling performance, scalability, and resilience challenges across the stack (infra, backend, data, and even client code).
• You have experience with guiding others in the principles of incident review, investigation and remedial activity.
• You know your way around observability tooling (logs, metrics, traces) and have strong instincts around diagnosing and debugging issues in live systems.
• You enjoy collaborating - as a Senior Reliability Engineer, you will need to share the knowledge, communicate and coordinate changes across multiple service teams.
• You care deeply about code quality, system design, and engineering excellence - you write tests, own your changes, and value readability and review.

Nice to have's: 

• Our services and libraries are primarily written in Java 13, so experience in Java is a nice-to-have. 
• Experience working with microservice architectures in large containerised, distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS). We're hosted on AWS and leverage the tools they provide as much as possible
• Experience working with data warehouse, analytics and reporting tools such as Snowflake, Mode Analytics and Looker.

About the Group

The Reliability Platform Group is responsible for providing the tools and processes to scale reliability across all Canva services. Our teams work together, and with other groups, to deliver preventive and detective tooling, processes and best practices that uplift Canva's reliability. We do this by driving operational excellence, reducing the impact of incidents, and providing visibility and accountability across the broader Engineering community.

This role sits within the Reliability Foundations team, whose focus is on providing tools and guidance for Canva's engineering teams to measure and maintain their systems' reliability. Their key areas of practice include on-call management, service-level management, production readiness and operational review.

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 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.