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. That means if you want to do your thing in the office (if you're near one), at home or a bit of both, it's up to you.

What you’d be doing in this role

As a Senior Software Engineer within the Cloud Compute team, you’ll be extending and operating foundational Kubernetes infrastructure that supports Canva's services, along with tooling to build and manage Linux machines.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Designing, building, and operating Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple cloud providers
• Building and maintaining automation for cluster lifecycle management, node provisioning, and provider onboarding
• Developing platform tooling and abstractions that enable other Canva engineers to deploy and scale workloads without understanding the underlying infrastructure
• Investigating and resolving system performance and reliability issues across the compute stack
• Managing and improving the cluster addon ecosystem — the shared capabilities that make clusters production-ready
• Participating in on-call rotations and drive operational excellence through incident response, post-incident review, and preventive automation
• Contributing to technical decisions on architecture, tooling choices, and platform direction

You're probably a match if

• You have strong Computer Engineering / Science knowledge around fundamentals and first principles relating to concurrency, multithreading, data structures, architecture, and various design patterns
• You have experience as a Senior Software Engineer building platform or infrastructure products in Golang.
• You have strong experience operating Kubernetes clusters in production at scale
• You have a deep understanding of Linux systems - kernel, networking, performance troubleshooting, OS image management
• Have have familiarity with infrastructure-as-code practices and GitOps workflows
• You have an understanding of cloud networking and security fundamentals
• You have experience with observability systems and practices (metrics, logging, alerting)
• You have a methodical approach to debugging complex distributed systems
• You are comfortable working across cloud providers, you don't need expertise in all of them, but you should be adaptable
• You have experience using generative AI tools in your engineering workflow

About the team

The Cloud Compute team owns Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, container orchestration, workload scheduling, and the integration of compute resources from multiple cloud providers into a unified platform. The team also owns the cluster addon ecosystem — the capabilities layered onto Kubernetes clusters that make them production-ready and observable. Cloud Compute is responsible for base images for all Canva compute use cases.

The team operates at significant scale: 500,000+ vCPUs, 7,800+ GPUs, across production and non-production environments in multiple regions.

About the role

The role focused on Kubernetes infrastructure, Linux systems, and multi-cloud compute. You will work across the full lifecycle of compute infrastructure — from provisioning bare metal and virtual machines, to operating Kubernetes clusters, to building the platform tooling that other engineers at Canva depend on.

The role sits at the intersection of infrastructure operations and platform engineering. You will operate production systems under on-call, but the team's trajectory is toward building products that automate operational work. You should be comfortable with both.

The team primarily writes Go. The infrastructure stack includes Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, self-managed), Cluster API, Karpenter, ArgoCD, and a range of cluster addons. You will work with Linux at a systems level — kernel tuning, OS image builds, node lifecycle management.

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 stack 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 lifeatcanva.com 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.