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      Software Engineer Interview

      Apr 28, 2017
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Canva in Mar 2017

      Interview

      Started with a phone call with an HR guy, he told me about the company and said that he will send me a challenge to solve. A tech team will review my submission and if they like it, they will interview me. He mentioned the code need not be production quality but his email said I could take as much time as I want and "keep refactoring until you're happy with it". I spent 8-10 hours with the problem and decided to submit it. Frankly, it is endless to keep optimizing it, it's open ended where to stop. After asking atleast 10 times over email across a span of a month, the HR finally replied saying they didn't like my code. The review comments made me realize that they were indeed looking for production ready code. In such cases, problems should be small. The company cannot expect me to spend days and weeks on a problem to only get rejected in the end for such an endless question. Their emailing system is bad, I had to follow up atleast 5 times for one reply from the HR. I had a horrible experience interviewing, though the challenge was impressive, it is unrealistic to expect a working professional to work on their long challenge.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      A custom implementation of Message Queues for Amazon SQS based on the description provided.
      Answer question
      7
      avatar
      Canva response
      9y
      I'm sorry you did not have the best experience with our interview process. We're always aiming to provide a top notch candidate experience and sometimes we get it wrong. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially after you have spent a lot of time working on a technical solution that doesn't quite pass the review process. It is important to note that *everyone* who has applied or expressed interest in a backend position (yourself included) since January 2017 was informed from the get-go that the backend hiring process would be slow-rolled and that there would be delays in interview traction and challenge feedback until June 2017. To put it in context, 2016 was a breakout year for Canva. We've had some amazing talent join us from around the world, we've released some amazing new features, products, and we've launched in over 40 languages. With that sort of growth, comes many challenges. We realized that we needed to ensure that the recent starters were being on-boarded and mentored with the same care, attention, and quality as every other person who's joined us over the past few years. To ensure we set our engineers up for success, we chose to slow down backend hiring. Finally, we do not expect job-seekers to spend 8-10 hours on the assignment, that's incredibly excessive and in no way our intention. To be perfectly transparent, the average time spent on the challenge by successful hires is 4 - 6 hours at a maximum, so I'm surprised you worked on it for so long. Perhaps we didn't get it right respect to managing your expectations as to the difficulty of the challenge and we apologize the experience wasn't positive for you. Thank you very much for the feedback and don't hesitate to contact your recruiter directly if you have any further questions or want more clarification on the specific feedback you were given with respect to your challenge submission.

      Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Canva

      Software Engineer Interview

      Nov 2, 2025
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Canva

      Interview

      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.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Design of a chat app
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      Dec 22, 2025
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Sydney
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      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
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      Sep 16, 2025
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Sydney
      Declined offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Sep 2025

      Interview

      Recruiter screening, 3 technical interviews (1. language-agnostic, AI-assisted coding 2. unassisted coding in Java 3. system design), 1 leadership interview, 1 hiring manager interview. The process took about 4 weeks end-to-end.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      They seem to favour Canva-themed questions.
      Answer question

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