Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

About Canva

Canva is changing the way the world designs. Our simple, online design platform allows anybody to create incredible, professional designs – putting the power of visual communication at their fingertips.

Our mission: Driven by a team of talented thinkers, an amazing culture and a remarkable growth trajectory – we’re out to change the world, by empowering everyone to express themselves through the power of design. We're just getting started.

Position

About the Reliability Platform Group 

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, Availability, Detection & Response, Major Incident Response and Pre-Emption domains and is set to grow rapidly in the near future as we shoot for some ambitious goals.

Role Responsibilities

• Oversight of all Reliability Engineering activities.
• Performing deep dives into both systemic and latent reliability issues.
• Engaging in service capacity planning and demand forecasting, software performance analysis and system tuning.
• Grow out, build and drive the operational excellence culture & best practices across the engineering specialty.
• Deliver continuous improvement of operational processes, tools and capabilities based on operational experiences and application of industry-standard methodologies.
• Set vision and direction for reliability teams, including usage of platforms and tools.
• Representing the reliability team in design reviews and operational readiness exercises for new and existing services.

Your qualification

• Ability to set and drive the long term strategy for the team, while delivering on incremental value for the business.
• Excellent ability to build and maintain healthy relationships with diverse business & engineering stakeholders.
• Demonstrates a passion for learning and technology with the ambition to drive and succeed collaboratively.
• Experience with technical and people leadership - having previously led high-performing teams where everyone is able to share their best ideas and be their best selves.
• Experience working with a mainstream programming language.
• Solid understanding of resiliency techniques and patterns – load balancing, throttling, back pressure, circuit breaking, etc.
• Disciplined coding practices, experience with code reviews and pull requests and a creative and conceptual problem-solving approach.
• Strong communication and team collaboration skills, both written and verbal, as you will need to share knowledge, communicate and coordinate changes across multiple teams.
• Be capable of leading by example - promoting Canva’s values, no-blame mentality, and engineering values
• Five-plus (5+) years of commercial experience working with developing complex, distributed web applications.

Will be a plus

• Experience working with microservice architectures in large complex distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS).
• We’re hosted on AWS and leverage the tools they provide as much as possibleExperience with RPC Frameworks, Finagle, Thrift or gRPC will be a huge plus, but not required; Understanding how services communicate with each other is crucial to find out where a failure can occur.
• Knowledge of networking protocols such as TCP, HTTP/2, WebSockets, etc. would be a big plus; The life of a request doesn’t start inside the backend web server, but rather in the browser of a user.
• Previous experience of working as a reliability/chaos engineer and/or strong knowledge of Google SRE corpus et. al.
• Previous experience establishing, growing, and developing new teams from the ground up.
• Experience writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

What we offer

• Competitive salary, plus stock options via our ESOP plan.
• Flexible daily working hours, we value work-life balance.
• Breakfast and lunch prepared by our wonderful Vibe team.
• Onsite-Gym and Yoga Membership.
• End-of-Trip Facilities: Bicycle parking and showers.
• Generous parental (including secondary) leave policy.
• Pet-friendly offices.
• Internal Coaching and Employee Support Programs.
• Sponsored social clubs, team events, and celebrations.
• Relocation budget for interstate or overseas individuals that legally qualify for visa sponsorship.