Production Engineering Manager

Canva

1d

About The Position

This Engineering Manager role leads Embedded, one of Production Engineering's two teams. You'll lead a technically strong group of engineers, deliberately weighted toward senior talent, working simultaneously across several of Canva's most important production challenges. Right now, those engagements include safeguarding critical data, making software changes safer, building reliability and observability into a major platform rewrite, and building tooling and frameworks to allow services to increase resilience to overload scenarios. Because Embedded works alongside teams outside your reporting line, the role depends as much on influence as authority. You'll need to earn the trust of engineering leaders quickly, help your engineers navigate different technical and organisational environments, and stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions and shape important technical decisions. Embedded is still new, so you won't be stepping into a finished playbook. You'll help decide which problems the team takes on, how engagements should work, what great looks like, and how we measure whether Production Engineering is having the impact we intended. You'll also be responsible for creating an environment where experienced engineers can do their best work: setting direction, building psychological safety, giving direct coaching and helping senior engineers grow their technical and organisational influence. Looking ahead, this role will help build: Impact where it matters most: Focus Embedded on the production problems where it can make the biggest difference, build trust with engineering leaders so the team is brought in early, and make that impact visible through measurable outcomes. A model that scales: Work out how Embedded can run more engagements without losing the technical bar, coaching quality or close partnerships that make the model effective. Standards worth reusing: Turn lessons from individual engagements into engineering practices, patterns and capabilities that can benefit teams across Canva. The next generation of leaders: Develop senior engineers and engagement leads who can coach others, lead increasingly complex work and multiply the team's impact.

Requirements

• Leading senior engineers: You've led highly experienced software engineers and technical leads through complex or ambiguous work, and know how to coach people operating with significant autonomy.
• Production exposure: You've worked in software environments where reliability, scalability and production risk genuinely mattered.
• Earned authority: You've built trust from a standing start, particularly in environments where influence mattered more than reporting lines.
• Cross-org delivery: You've led significant technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or groups, from understanding the problem through to delivering an outcome.
• Driving adoption: You've persuaded teams to change how they build or operate software, even when they were busy, skeptical or already had an established way of working.
• Engineering leadership: You can communicate complex technical trade-offs to senior stakeholders while creating an environment where engineers can challenge ideas, learn, receive direct feedback and do their best work.
• CS fundamentals: A strong grounding in computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading and data structures.
• Language depth: Enough depth in languages such as Go, Python, Java or C++ to engage meaningfully with designs, implementation choices and technical trade-offs.
• Systems knowledge: Strong working knowledge of system internals, networking and cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.
• Systems thinking: Comfortable reasoning through ambiguous problems spanning multiple components, teams and constraints, with a strong understanding of system design, architecture and engineering patterns.
• Reliability engineering: Familiarity with observability, capacity, failure modes and the operational characteristics of production systems.
• Scale and criticality: Experience working in large-scale or high-criticality environments where reliability failures have meaningful consequences for users, systems or the business.

Nice To Haves

• SRE/PE management: Prior experience leading Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering or a closely related function
• Infrastructure exposure: Experience with large-scale storage, CDN, networking or distributed infrastructure
• Growing technical leaders: A history of developing senior engineers and technical leads who can coach others and take on increasingly complex work
• Function-building: Experience helping define the identity, operating model or scope of a technical function while it was still taking shape

Responsibilities

• Lead a technically strong group of engineers, deliberately weighted toward senior talent, working simultaneously across several of Canva's most important production challenges.
• Safeguard critical data.
• Make software changes safer.
• Build reliability and observability into a major platform rewrite.
• Build tooling and frameworks to allow services to increase resilience to overload scenarios.
• Earn the trust of engineering leaders quickly.
• Help engineers navigate different technical and organisational environments.
• Stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions and shape important technical decisions.
• Help decide which problems the team takes on.
• Help decide how engagements should work.
• Help define what great looks like.
• Help define how to measure whether Production Engineering is having the intended impact.
• Create an environment where experienced engineers can do their best work: setting direction, building psychological safety, giving direct coaching and helping senior engineers grow their technical and organisational influence.
• Focus Embedded on the production problems where it can make the biggest difference.
• Build trust with engineering leaders so the team is brought in early.
• Make that impact visible through measurable outcomes.
• Work out how Embedded can run more engagements without losing the technical bar, coaching quality or close partnerships that make the model effective.
• Turn lessons from individual engagements into engineering practices, patterns and capabilities that can benefit teams across Canva.
• Develop senior engineers and engagement leads who can coach others, lead increasingly complex work and multiply the team's impact.

Benefits

• Equity packages
• 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 support you personally

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed