Senior Production Engineering Manager

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.

What you'd be doing in this role:

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.

You’re probably a match:

We'd love to hear from you if you fit one or more of these. You don't need to meet all of them, but the more the better and if you join the team, we're invested in helping you grow.

Experience:

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.

Technical knowledge:

CS fundamentals: A strong grounding in computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, multithreading and data structures.