I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Canva in Oct 2021
Interview
Absolutely unprofessional. The interviewer reused a meeting invite. This meant that when I joined a minute early to sort out my camera and microphone, I interrupted a previous candidate.
The meeting was touted to be 'a chat to discuss the opportunity', but a technical screen was sprung upon me by the HR person.
The interview concluded with the interviewer telling me that they could pass me on to the next stage, but that I should be brushing up on my Java if I want to pass.
This is an interview for a job ad that claims, "Most of our code is in Java, but we're pragmatic - we'll use whatever makes the most sense to complete a task (previous experience with other languages is great!)"
It seems that Canva is looking for a very specific kind of engineer, which is fair enough. I'm not that engineer, which is fair enough too.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked highly Java-specific questions that were likely just read off a list. When asked about threading and how I would manage multiple threads using the same resource, I gave the answer of either an atomic or a mutex. The atomic answer was 'acceptable' but mutex was not as the right answer was to use an intrinsic lock. 🤔
Then I was given a list of 5 functions and asked to describe what they're doing. I answered all of them correctly but the interviewer was apparently unimpressed that I relied on my software engineering fundamentals instead of specific Java knowledge.
Technical interview focused on coding and system design problems, emphasizing clean code, scalability, and architectural decisions.
Received detailed, professional feedback highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in design and implementation.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Nov 2025
Interview
Interview went well, everyone was nice and communication from team was great, 3 rounds of interviews, get to know you (minor technical questions), ai code interview, and final 3 round interview (system design, behavioral, live coding)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Do a system design for a Merchandising store, give api request examples and also structure of data objects etc
