I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Jul 2025
Interview
The interview process itself is fine but the recruitment team and engineering team are shockingly bad. Constant delays and miscommunication from recruitment team, scheduling wrong interviews, rescheduling interviews with 10 minutes to go for 3 hours later without even a call to confirm if it's okay. Rescheduling happened several times.
I actually do like the interview format overall but many of the engineers are incompetent. One of their engineers didn't know how 'synchronized' in Java actually worked, I corrected them and they were offended and put this as a negative on my feedback around "not knowing how Java works". I thought maybe I am in the wrong and validated my understanding later to find out I was completely correct. Astonishing!
They say you can use any language for one of the interviews but I got negative feedback for that interviewer because the interviewer didn't understand everything in said language.
The interview itself is easy compared to other tech giants (like Google). However, I doubt the credentials and ability of half of the people interviewing me based on the feedback I received. This isn't me being biased, they were just weak engineers on a technical level.
With that being said, some of the engineers are obviously talented and nice, it is just too chaotic and hit-and-miss with who you get.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
AI/LLM coding round.
Design dashboard that tracks views of videos.
Review a Java pull request for some code.
Canva Values round.
Pros: Interview prep materials were detailed and sent well ahead of each stage. The AI-assisted coding round was a genuinely interesting format.
Cons: The process took roughly two and a half months end-to-end, across seven separate touchpoints: a recruiter screen, an informal chat with an engineering lead, two technical interviews, a three-competency final loop crammed into one almost-three-hour session with a single 15-minute break, an additional vibe check with someone more senior, and a couple of feedback calls. After the final loop, communication went quiet. I had to follow up twice over the following fortnight before getting any answer. After all that time investment, unpaid and unsupported by any interim feedback, the outcome was a generic "closer match" rejection.
Advice to Management: Consider consolidating the number of discrete interview stages, or at minimum be upfront about the likely timeline so candidates can plan around it. If a decision date slips, a proactive heads-up beats making candidates chase twice for a status update.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system architecture to generate multi-media outputs from design templates and related resources.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in May 2026
Interview
Recruiter was very friendly. He was new at the company though and gave inaccurate information about what was to be asked. I got 2 strong hires in the final round (language fluency, values). For technical communications, it is unclear what the outcome was. I was presented with a very detailed document and unclear expectations. Feedback was very unfair and contradictory to what happened in the interview. I thought I just had an unfair interview, but since found out that the company rescinded offers and froze positions and kicked people out after probation. Something is looming at Canva.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tech comms round included system design concepts, contrary to recruiter's guidance.
The technical interview process felt poorly calibrated and inconsistently framed. The main issue was not that the questions were difficult, but that several rounds seemed to test a different skill set than what was communicated beforehand.
In practice, it often felt unclear what the primary evaluation criteria actually were. Some rounds started as if they were focused coding exercises, but the expected discussion appeared to extend into broader design, scaling, or product-style considerations without that scope being made explicit early on. That made it difficult to judge how much time to spend on core implementation versus higher-level tradeoff discussion. The result was a process that felt noisy rather than rigorous.