Staff Software Reliability Engineer

Job Description

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:

• Leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams to improve system reliability and resilience
• Owning and driving multi year reliability roadmaps, including capacity planning and resource allocation
• Owning end to end reliability processes and driving their adoption across the engineering organisation
• Driving the design and implementation of critical reliability infrastructure, tools, and libraries that will be adopted organisation wide
• Managing technical relationships with key reliability vendors and external partners
• Partnering with engineering teams to establish and maintain SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets across key services
• Leading post incident reviews for major incidents and drive systemic improvements based on learnings
• Acting as a subject matter expert in resilience engineering, conducting and guiding experiments to validate system resilience

You're probably a match if

• You have strong experience with a mainstream programming language, with the ability to review and guide architectural decisions. The interviews can be in Java, Python or Golang.
• You have deep expertise in at least one area of reliability engineering (e.g. chaos engineering, observability, incident response, or capacity planning)
• You have 5+ years of commercial experience working on developing complex, distributed web applications
• You have a proven track record of leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or systems
• You have an expert understanding of resiliency techniques and patterns - load balancing, throttling, back pressure, circuit breaking, etc.
• You have experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership without formal authority
• You have demonstrated the ability to influence engineering culture and drive the adoption of best practices across teams
• You have experience with service capacity planning, performance analysis, and system tuning at scale
• You have a track record of solving ambiguous problems and delivering high impact solutions
• You have experience managing vendor relationships and evaluating technical solutions

About the team

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. The group encompasses Observability & Reliability domains and is set to grow rapidly in the near future as we shoot for some ambitious goals.

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.