Senior Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Golang)

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 Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect.

This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. 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

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Designing, building, and operating Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple cloud providers
• Building and maintaining custom xDS control planes
• 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 service mesh, private/pubic key infrastructure, Envoy or Istio
• You are familiar with infrastructure-as-code practices and GitOps workflows
• You have an understanding of 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 have experience using generative AI tools in your engineering workflow

About the Service Plane team

The Service Plane team owns Kubernetes cluster services that provide workload deployment, scaling, identity, service discovery and application layer connectivity. The team also owns the cluster addon ecosystem — the capabilities layered onto Kubernetes clusters that make them production-ready and observable. We are a software engineering team, solving the challenges of infrastructure at scale by building software products.

The platform operates at significant scale: 500,000+ vCPUs, 7,800+ GPUs, 50k replicas across 3500 deployments in multiple regions.

About the role

The role focused on Kubernetes infrastructure, Service mesh and workload identity. You will work across a broad domain of Kubernetes infrastructure — from operating large Kubernetes clusters, continuous deployment systems, building and operating custom controllers and control planes, 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, but the team's trajectory is toward building software products that automate operational work. You should be comfortable with both.

The team primarily works in Go. The infrastructure stack includes Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, self-managed), Envoy, Istio, Cluster API, Karpenter, ArgoCD, and a range of cluster addons.

The ideal candidate brings strong production Kubernetes experience and solid software engineering skills — the team writes Go and builds the platform that allows engineers to build and operate connected services at scale.

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.