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Canva
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Canva ·
Session revocations at scale
Canva gateways check in-memory session revocations on every request, but pulling over a million revocations from MySQL during deployments created severe database stampedes. To eliminate this bottleneck, the team transitioned to storing a twelve-hour sliding window of revocations in Amazon S3 partitioned into 30-minute chunks. Each revocation is packed into a 16-byte binary structure within a sorted flat array, allowing gateways to query records via direct binary search without object deserialization. Asynchronous workers batch updates into S3 using ZooKeeper leader election and conditional PUT requests for optimistic concurrency control. This architecture reduced the in-memory cache footprint by 87.5% and allowed the team to reduce their MySQL database to just two read replicas.
Llew VallisCanva ·
AI Interview Success: An Interviewer's Inside Guide
Canva conducts AI-assisted programming interviews designed to evaluate candidates' engineering fundamentals amplified by artificial intelligence tools. Successful candidates structure their interviews across planning, development, and discussion phases, clarifying architectural assumptions before writing code and critically reviewing AI-generated output. Interviewers evaluate engineering problem-solving, technical depth, code ownership, and the effective collaboration with AI assistants rather than isolated prompting mechanics or rushed feature completion. Ineffective strategies include treating models as hands-off solution generators, rushing unvetted features, and prioritizing demonstrations of advanced prompting over core technical judgment. Preparation involves setting up project structures in advance, exploring requirements aloud, and remaining ready to justify architectural trade-offs and production scalability.
Karl HörnlundCanva ·
From Intern Project to Production: How I Shipped the Draw Tool for Canva's Present Mode
Canva engineers developed and shipped a real-time drawing tool for presentation mode after user feedback highlighted it as a highly requested feature. Integrating the existing editor-bound draw functionality into presentations required resolving tight package coupling, dual-window scaling mismatches, and performance regressions. To overcome architectural boundaries, core draw logic was extracted into a shared common package using interface abstractions. Coordinate normalization resolved positioning and scaling differences across presenter and audience views, while code-splitting deferred loading the core engine until activation. As a result, presentation load time regression dropped from 7% to 0.24%, and the feature reached over 470,000 monthly active users in production.
Edwina AdisusilaCanva ·
Measuring Commercial Impact at Scale at Canva
Canva needed a scalable, standardized way to calculate the commercial impact of thousands of annual experiments on key business metrics like Monthly Active Users and Annual Recurring Revenue. Previously, disparate teams spent over six hours per experiment performing manual, error-prone calculations across fragmented spreadsheets and inconsistent data models. To resolve this, Canva built the IMPACT app using Snowflake, Streamlit, Snowpark, and Cortex to provide a self-serve platform tied directly to its central finance model. The application scales local uplift by actual audience exposure and supports pre-experiment scenario modeling alongside post-experiment tracking. A custom deployment workflow generates pull-request-isolated Streamlit environments in Snowflake stages, reducing time-to-insight to under ten minutes while enabling multiple developers to safely build and demo features in parallel.
Jun YeCanva ·
Yes, You Can Use AI in Our Interviews. In fact, we insist
Canva has updated its technical hiring process to require backend, machine learning, and frontend engineering candidates to utilize artificial intelligence tools such as Copilot, Cursor, and Claude during interviews. The transition addresses the limitations of traditional computer science fundamentals tests, which focused on writing algorithmic code from scratch even though AI assistants can generate complete solutions in seconds. To better evaluate on-the-job engineering capabilities, the company replaced its legacy screening with an AI-assisted coding competency that features complex, ambiguous product challenges such as designing an airport control system. Interviewers assess how candidates clarify requirements, guide tools on subtasks, debug flawed output, and verify that AI-generated code meets production quality standards. Candidates receive advance notice of these expectations, helping ensure prospective hires demonstrate strong engineering judgment when collaborating with assistive coding technologies.
Simon NewtonCanva ·
Behind the scenes of Canva's DesignDNA campaign
Canva launched DesignDNA in December 2024 as a personalized year-in-review campaign to highlight user achievements and showcase generative AI capabilities. Because internal privacy rules strictly prohibited inspecting personal designs, the engineering and creative teams inferred user preferences from the style and theme metadata tags on public templates. An initial keyword-matching algorithm paired 95% of users with one of seven emerging design trends, while generative AI keyword expansion increased coverage to 99%. The team also synthesized over one million localized poems and distinct design personalities using tools like Magic Write and Dream Lab. Finally, dynamic Canva template elements populated through URL parameters assembled 95 million distinct multi-page stories across nine locales.
Divya PatelCanva ·
Image replacement in Canva designs using reverse image search
Canva needed an automated way to replace media in design templates, such as when third-party licensing partnerships expire across more than 150 million images. Existing recommendation engines, perceptual hashing, and text metadata searches failed to capture visual similarity hierarchies or ensure replacement relevance. To build a reverse image search system, engineers evaluated embedding models including CLIP, ViTMAE, DreamSim, CaiT, and DINOv2 alongside an external vector database supporting metadata filtering. Evaluation on sample datasets identified DINOv2 as the best model for preserving subjects, background context, and color tones in photos. Integrated into the Template Assistant as a human-in-the-loop tool, the automated suggestions increased image replacement speeds by 4.5 times during initial pilot testing.
Sam JacobsCanva ·
The foundations of Canva’s continuous data platform with Snowpipe Streaming
As Canva expanded to over 200 million monthly active users, ingestion throughput reached 25 billion records daily, causing AWS Data Firehose costs to consume nearly half of the product analytics platform budget. To reduce these expenses and eliminate intermediate file staging, the engineering team integrated Snowflake's Snowpipe Streaming directly with their Java-based Kinesis Data Streams pipeline. The architecture streams records directly into Snowflake tables using logical channels with offset checkpoints while configuring client buffering up to a five-minute maximum lag. In handling Kinesis Client Library edge cases, record processors coordinate with the LeaseCoordinator to drop leases when channels become unhealthy. Operating in production for over six months, the system ingested more than 20.35 petabytes of data, decreased query latency to roughly ten minutes, and reduced overall cloud spend by 45 percent.
Jack CaperonCanva ·
Canva incident report: API Gateway outage
On November 12, 2024, canva.com suffered an outage lasting approximately one hour due to cascading API Gateway failures. The disruption began when a stale Cloudflare routing rule induced severe latency and packet loss between Ashburn and Singapore during an editor asset deployment. Cloudflare's concurrent streaming mechanism consolidated over 270,000 user requests for a single delayed JavaScript chunk; when the asset finally loaded, clients simultaneously generated a 1.5 million requests-per-second thundering herd to Canva's API Gateway. This surge collided with a telemetry performance regression involving lock contention on Netty event loop threads, exhausting off-heap memory and causing the Linux Out Of Memory Killer to terminate API Gateway containers. Canva mitigated the failure by temporarily blocking all traffic at the CDN level, stabilizing replacement Amazon ECS tasks, and gradually restoring traffic under strict rate limits.
Brendan HumphreysCanva ·
The science of routing print orders
Canva's global print network requires selecting optimal suppliers to balance delivery times, packaging counts, and environmental emissions. To resolve these challenges before user checkout, the engineering team designed a modular routing architecture that decouples graph construction, decision logic, and path traversal. During graph traversal, the system generates action objects capturing forward paths and decision query results, which are compiled into timestamped routing logs in blob storage for asynchronous auditing. Utilizing preprocessed graph queries alongside ElastiCache, Redis, and database read replicas, the infrastructure sustains high-throughput evaluation without coupling cost logic to traversal code. As a result, print routing completes within an average of 50 milliseconds at the 99th percentile during peak usage while maintaining 99.999% data availability.
Constantinos Kavadias