I applied through a recruiter. The process took four weeks.

Overall, interviewers are friendly. Their experience can vary from senior to intermediate, and they could have different focus thinking. You just have to read the vibe and align with what their focus is. I can see not all of them have strong experience as interviewers, so this is the time to test your luck as well, which you need that luck to be successful in any interview anyway.

There were two rounds of screening: an external and an internal recruiter, just standard to make sure you know what you are talking about. The pre-tech screen round was an AI coding challenge to implement a text-image rendering system. The task was to take input text and a specified font URL, and to output an image of the text in that font format. It was a no-brainer for me since my current job utilises AI assistants every day. For people with no experience, you probably need to pay some money for a pro plan of your preferred vendor and make sure you practice it well. At least know how to think of AI as your junior and you are giving clear instructions for it to implement something not way off the track.

The following steps were all done in one session continuously, with different interviewers:

• Behaviour and leadership: An introduction. Tell me a time you had to make fast decisions without data supporting it. Tell me when you made something from good to great. Tell me a time you had to work with different business stakeholders and how you interacted with them.
• Programming Language fluency test: Implement a cache. Technically, create a hash map from the basic Java without the Java inbuilt hash map utility. Only Canva developers can confirm if this is really related to their day-to-day work. It is practical, but being a senior for more than ten years, my memory is rusty on this. But I could also see this is much more relevant than a hard LeetCode question that has nothing to do with your job. I dropped the ball here. I needed a few hints from the interviewer to refresh my memory of how to create a hash map from the ground up. Therefore, it was time-consuming, and there was no time to actually finish writing all the tests for the inner class. My IDE was having issues running the tests to prove my tests were perfect. Turns out all I needed was to restart it. I was puzzled why the tests didn't work and tested them after all the interview had finished.
• Pair review: Review this PR and tell me what you can spot with an implementation and tests. Later, an improved version of it. Now tell me what is wrong there. What is wrong if someone posts a quick message about a release plan? What would you do for a similar release plan in a safer way?
• System design: Design an eCommerce site. The interview is more focused on the initial technical requirements and pre-decided details on the product side rather than the system design side. For example, the details of what parameters you will have on the API endpoints, which is a bit different from the normal system design interview where you can show off what trade-offs are with a design diagram and try to skip this less juicy time as a senior. Only the last 15 to 20 minutes are focused on the actual system diagram. This may very well depend on the interviewer, but it does align with the Canva pillar of product thinking.

The feedback loop of the result took about two weeks after chasing it up a few times, then I received an email about not moving forward, with a generic message about:

• It wasn’t a match this time, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be another role that's even better suited to your skill set.
• It gave an opportunity to chat again on the phone regarding how the interview feedback went.

I can't validate whether the above feedback cycle is true or just being polite, since I have been unable to get a response for a week now trying to book a time for that phone call. Good luck with your interview, and I hope this is useful.

The questions included:

• Implement a text-image rendering system with AI assistance.
• Tell me when you made something from good to great.
• Tell me about a time you had to work with different business stakeholders and how you interacted with them.
• Implement a cache without Java util (HashMap).
• What feedback do you have for the given release plan message?
• Design an eCommerce site.