I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Mar 2024
Interview
One screening interview where i had to write a program to solve an arithmetic expressions with numbers and +-* and no parenthesis followed up with 2 coding, one system design and one values/ management interview.
I was expected before the start of one of the interviews to state my preferred pronouns and am pretty sure that is the main reason I was rejected - I have no preferred pronouns.
It is a shame for a company that claims to be so inclusive to have such a blatant discrimination towards people without preferred pronouns.
I have answered everything they asked me to, so pretty much I had no idea why I was rejected. The feedback from the recruiter was saying that the person who rejected me said that I didn't go far enough in his task, but we spent more than 10 mins at the end chatting?! Why he didn't use the time to ask me more questions? But why bother for a person with no preferred pronouns, what a shame!!!!
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
System Design: Design a system like redit where i can add and reply to comments
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in May 2026
Interview
Recruiter was very friendly. He was new at the company though and gave inaccurate information about what was to be asked. I got 2 strong hires in the final round (language fluency, values). For technical communications, it is unclear what the outcome was. I was presented with a very detailed document and unclear expectations. Feedback was very unfair and contradictory to what happened in the interview. I thought I just had an unfair interview, but since found out that the company rescinded offers and froze positions and kicked people out after probation. Something is looming at Canva.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tech comms round included system design concepts, contrary to recruiter's guidance.
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.