Production Engineering Manager

Canva

3d • Remote

About The Position

This role leads the Core team within Production Engineering, a team of software engineers responsible for Production Engineering's services and broader engineering problems that span multiple teams. The manager will guide the team in transforming complex problems into focused engineering goals and ensuring their delivery. They will maintain technical involvement to challenge assumptions and aid decision-making while empowering engineers with ownership. The role involves shaping the team's future focus, priorities, and the problems it tackles, as well as defining how initiatives are structured and measured. Additionally, the manager will oversee the team's daily operations, including setting priorities, coaching engineers, fostering psychological safety, and developing their organizational influence. Future contributions include building reliable services at scale, establishing reusable standards, strengthening the Core-Embedded team loop, and growing engineering depth by coaching engineers on complex problems.

Requirements

• Experience Leading engineers: You've led software engineers through complex or ambiguous technical work and know how to coach people to grow their skills and autonomy.
• Production exposure: You've worked in software environments where reliability, scalability and production risk genuinely mattered.
• Delivery ownership: You've taken significant technical initiatives from understanding the problem through to delivery, including work spanning multiple teams.
• Driving adoption: You've helped teams adopt new tools, practices or ways of working, even when they were busy or already had an established approach.
• Engineering leadership: You can communicate technical trade-offs clearly, set direction without prescribing every decision, and create an environment where engineers can challenge ideas, learn 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 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 engineers who can coach others and take on increasingly complex work.
• Function-building: Experience helping shape the scope, ways of working or identity of a technical team while it was still evolving.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of software engineers who own Production Engineering's services.
• Take on broader engineering problems that cut across multiple teams and groups.
• Help the team turn complex, sometimes loosely defined problems into focused engineering goals and get them delivered.
• Stay close enough to the technical work to challenge assumptions, understand trade-offs and help engineers make strong decisions.
• Define the team's next phase by setting its focus, priorities and the problems Core takes on next.
• Help shape how initiatives are structured and measured.
• Turn lessons from individual pieces of work into capability with broader reach and impact across Canva.
• Own the day-to-day health of the team: setting clear priorities, coaching engineers directly, creating psychological safety and helping their team develop organisational fluency and influence.
• Help Core's services and capabilities keep pace as Production Engineering grows.
• Turn lessons from individual problems and engagements into engineering practices and capabilities that can be applied more broadly.
• Build the feedback loops that let targeted learning from Embedded become reusable capability through Core.
• Coach engineers to take on increasingly complex technical and cross-team problems as Core's scope grows.

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: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed