I was referred, and receive a first round call from HR, however as I haven't previously coded with Java I wasn't considered in any capacity. There is no option to sit the entrance exam in a language you're familiar with. It's a little disappointing as I have 4 years of Ruby experience. It's safe to assume Canva receives enough applications from quality engineers that have the Java experience required.

The interview process seems to change quite a bit so make sure you look for more recent descriptions of the interviews. However, there were numerous rounds, starting with a recruiter screening, followed by an AI proficiency interview, this process is quite straightforward. However, if you don't have much experience with using Co-Pilot or Cursor, I would recommend practising a bit beforehand by creating a boilerplate project and adding tests. Be careful to check your code for mistakes. Ultimately, this interview tests whether you can debug the mistakes that the AI makes and whether you understand what your code is doing. Next, they gave me a "Programming Language Fluency" interview, a system design interview and a behavioural interview. The Programming Language fluency test was to implement a class that they had come up with. I didn't find it particularly difficult however I would make sure that your dev environment is setup with the correct language. For me there was some confusion over the language to be used however, the recruiters were very helpful when I asked them about it. The system design interview was quite standard, I had to design a system to process card payments. This was a pretty straightforward system design interview though I had read "System Design Interview: an insider's guide" in preparation for another interview which did come in very handy. Finally the behavioural interview was pretty standard. However, it does come after having done the previous two technical interviews in one sitting which I found quite taxing. I didn't pass this one but they did arrange a call to give me good feedback which I did apreciate. I ended up failing the behavioural interview but they gave me some good feedback as to why I didn't pass it which has been helpful for future interviews. The recruiters were extremely helpful whenever I had any questions and so do use them as a resource should there be any ambiguity. In fact they were so pleasant that I left smiling even though I got rejected