Senior Technical Program Manager - Releases

What you’d be doing in this role As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve. As a Release Manager TPM, you will orchestrate the smooth execution of our major releases — ensuring that Canva Create and Droptober are delivered seamlessly, with high-quality features reaching our users without disruption. You will oversee the entire release lifecycle, from deployment through to go-live day and post-release activities. At the moment, this role is focused on Governance of the end-to-end release process, including the activities, steps, and procedures involved in preparing, executing, and finalizing major releases such as Canva Create and Droptober. Develop and maintain a comprehensive release calendar, outlining key milestones, activities and procedures. Spearhead the evolution of release practices — designing and implementing scalable release processes and tooling that support Canva’s growth and increasing feature complexity. Create and refine documentation to guide teams through the release process, ensuring clarity and consistency. Coordinate and synchronize feature launches across multiple teams (product, engineering, marketing, and user feedback) to ensure smooth and successful major events. Facilitate effective communication and collaboration between departments to address and resolve issues promptly. Monitor the performance of each release and ensure alignment with Canva’s key strategies. Drive continuous improvement of release processes and tooling based on retrospectives and feedback from stakeholders. Manage the dynamic nature of coordinating major releases, adapting to varying feature scopes and evolving requirements. Ensure a unified release process across teams, groups, and strategic goals. Coordinate with engineering teams to ensure adherence to release timelines and instructions. Align with the marketing team on release schedules and go-live activities, including B2B, brand, and PMM initiatives. Navigate and manage scope changes to align with shifting business strategies. You're probably a match if A minimum of 5 years TPM or release management experience at an established and complex organization Domain experience working with release engineering, deployment pipelines, or platform infrastructure Deep understanding of release management processes, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment strategies Experience coordinating large-scale, cross-functional releases involving product, engineering, and marketing teams Comfortable with ambiguity in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities A natural communicator who leads through influence, not authority — able to coordinate across diverse, senior stakeholders without direct authority A love for navigating complexity and tackling ambiguous problems Process-oriented but flexible in approach Experience building scalable and repeatable processes from the ground up Dedicated to personal growth and improving in your craft as a TPM Leadership capability to ensure clarity, alignment and accountability to achieve our Crazy Big Goals Ability to think strategically but also able to make crazy big goals happen. This role will be very hands-on! About the Release Team Major releases at Canva are executed by various teams and stakeholders across the organization, but to ensure a successful release, this is managed by a centralized release process. The core release coordinating team is mainly supported by the Reliability Platform and Developer Platform groups in the Infra supergroup. The release squad executes Canva-wide principles such as code freeze and experiment freeze, improves tooling such as feature control and deployment pipelines, and evolves incident management and capacity planning for major releases. This role partners closely with teams across Platform, Product, and Marketing supergroups, ensuring al