Software Engineering Manager - Cloud Infrastructure

Canva and Project F

Canva has participated in Project F’s Program 50/50 since November 2019. Since then they have worked diligently to remove the systemic barriers identified for women in tech teams so that they can sustainably build gender-balanced teams.

This work is not easy and requires a consistent focus on structural change, removing bias from processes and systems and shifting the narrative on diversity and inclusion. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht is the Executive Sponsor of the program at Canva. Crystal Boysen, Head of People is leading the change across the entire organisation. The unique challenge of achieving gender balance within the subculture of technology has been made a strategic imperative and therefore treated as a high priority.

About the role

Canva, work every day to make a significant positive impact on society. Their mission is to democratise design and empower creativity for anyone, on any device and platform.

Since its launch in April 2013, Canva has grown exponentially, amassing over 30 million users in over 100 languages. They are the most valuable technology company in Australia, and one of the world’s fastest-growing technology companies in the world. They’re a values-driven organization with an engineering mindset that applies to everything that they do. Last year they continued to increase revenue and profitability, grew their valuation, and cracked the Top 10 in the Cloud 100.

Canva’s intuitive suite of design products is powered by their large distributed cloud infrastructure in AWS. As the features and services of their product suite evolve, they’re setting some large and ambitious goals and require Software Engineering Managers to ensure that their infrastructure engineering teams continue to deliver at speed and scale.

Responsibilities

Drive delivery of large-scale cloud, infrastructure, and developer tooling projects from ideation to completion within start-up time frames to ensure Canva’s overall reliability, performance, security, and stability
Driving technical strategy and providing leadership to your team in a fast-paced innovation-focused environment
Foster a culture of communication, bridging the communication gap between teams, group, and company leadership
Invest in working with engineers on growth and development opportunities to help further their skill set and grow into new roles, with an ability to deliver relevant and timely feedback (positive & constructive) to help them continuously improve and learn
Be heavily involved in hiring; build and grow high-performing and highly engaged teams of world-class engineers by attracting, interviewing, and selecting talent for your group
Coordinating and communicating across various specialties and parts of the business to understand the impact and feasibility of strategic goals within the group.
Drive delivery of large, cross-team and cross-group initiatives and projects from ideation to completion.

Requirements

Five or more years of technical and people leadership as a manager of managers/leader of leads
Previously built high-performing and collaborative teams where everyone is able to share their best ideas and be their best selves
Previous experience as a Software or Site Reliability Engineer - in tune with software engineering fundamentals and first principles
Previous experience in cloud-based environments (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) with a working knowledge of broad infrastructure functions - CI/CD pipelines, automation, site reliability, security, etc
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; with the ability to work with a diverse range of individuals from different backgrounds, with different expertise, and with different professional and personal needs
Experience making careful engineering tradeoffs, particularly around "Build vs Buy", evaluating potential third party systems to partner with, and managing and working with vendors to meet Canva's business needs
Strong customer focus to understand the use cases and requirements of internal stakeholders, and identify opportunities to empower them to do their best work
Be capable of leading by example - promoting Canva’s values, no-blame mentality, and engineering values.

Bonus experience

Subject-matter expertise of Amazon Web Services and associated technologies and products within the AWS ecosystem
Deep understanding of CI, Build, and Deployment Systems; or previous experience in automation and building Developer Tools
Previous experience establishing, growing, and developing new teams from the ground up