J'ai postulé en ligne. Le processus a pris 4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Canva en oct. 2025
Entretien
Overall, a very disjointed and unclear interview process for some onsite rounds. The recruiter described some rounds to me to prep me for the onsite, but in the end those rounds were completely different to what was in the email and what described to me. Having interviewed at other companies recently, I would say that Canva really needs to work on being more clear on what is expected in each round vs what they actually end up asking. Furthermore, some interviewers are not able to probe you for the role in question to assess your skills properly. For open ended rounds like system design, they expect a preconceived solution and do not let you lead the interview as is common for senior+ roles. Some interviewers are not personable at all and make the call quite uncomfortable either by being overly silent or by interrupting you with constant questions, disrupting your flow of thought and not allowing you to flesh out your solution. Some interviewers are good and are aware of the pitfalls of the system and work with you and that was nice. However, overall I felt that some interviewers here do not live up to Canva's self proclaimed culture of collaboration. I wonder what the vetting process is for being an interviewer? Despite correct code solutions and great feedback, I was rejected for not matching their rubric in some places, which again was not communicated appropriately :)
Edit : During my feedback call, I found out that the interviewer (for the system design round) said I didn't know a concept when I had clearly written it down on the whiteboard. This just proves to me that they were just listening and not paying attention to the screen, waiting for checklist answers to tick off. Interview here if you must, but just know that their assessment doesn't reflect upon who you are. This will continue to hold true if they don't vet the interviewers more thoroughly.
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Autres retours d’entretien d’embauche pour un poste comme Senior Software Engineer chez Canva
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.
Round 1 - HR screening call - asking about experience and motivation
Round 2 - AI assisted programming (1h), System design (45m)
Round 3 - Language proficiency (45m), Technical review (45m), Culture and leadership (1h)
The engineers were very friendly. However, the feedback was that I wasn't hitting the seniority expectations.
AI assisted programming - the interviewer expected to see the final result, although I was very close to it, I was disqualified for that. Everything else was acknowledged with strong signals
System design - I was asked to design a rendering system where users download the rendered outcome. The interviewer spent about 5 mins talking about his this role, the other interviewer role, and asked about my experience.
The engineers do not consider your background, if you haven't worked with media files, and related resources like CDN, SAS tokens etc. or you never engaged with downloads, they expect you to know it, and provide your immediate design.
1st interview:
1. AI Assisted Programming
Implement a text rendering cli tool, user can define the text, color, font and etc, cli need to render it into PNG file and save it locally.
2. System Design
Design a design rendering system.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
If leadership pushes for a hard delivery this quarter, but you think system stability is already risky, how do you handle that conversation?