About the team
The mission of Canva Research is to develop the AI technology that powers Canva's Creative Operating System, empowering everyone to design. We bridge cutting-edge research and applied methods with real-world challenges, building the technology that enables Canva, as an AI-native creative platform, solving today's problems and shaping tomorrow's.

Formed in June 2025, Canva Research has grown fast with teams across Sydney, London, Vienna, San Francisco and Beijing. We work across generative image, video, audio, agents, evaluations, on-device and foundation models, all with the same goal: turning research breakthroughs into features that make design more accessible, more capable and more fun for everyone who uses Canva.

About the role
In your role as Senior Research Scientist, you'll be at the heart of our mission to make advanced machine learning design tools easy for everyone to use. Your work will help create new features that make it simpler and more fun for Canva users to bring their ideas to life. By developing and integrating cutting-edge technologies, you'll help us achieve our goal of empowering the world to design.

We're open to a range of backgrounds for this role. You might come from design or image generation, video generation, or from an LLM/RL background looking to apply that expertise to a new modality. What matters most is a strong generative modelling foundation and the ability to pick up audio and video-specific problems quickly.

At the moment, this role is focused on

• Working closely with Research Engineers on research in audio, video and multimodal AI, translating theory into practical applications

• Determining and leading research initiatives aligned with short-term product goals and longer-term strategic goals

• Turning research insights and academic breakthroughs into practical use cases and advancing those findings

• Interpreting experimental results and translating them into actionable insights

• Continually tracking the state-of-the-art and identifying opportunities to incorporate new technologies into our research

• Designing, developing, and implementing innovative model architectures and algorithms for generative and multimodal content, applying that thinking to audio and video problems

• Optimizing and scaling models for efficiency, latency, and throughput across large distributed systems

• Collaborating closely with cross-functional stakeholders across Canva to build aligned, technically feasible, and high-impact solutions

You're likely a match if you have

• Led the development, training, and iteration of foundational or open models based on both internal research and external advancements, in any generative domain (image, video, audio or language)

• A publication record or evidence of research impact in academia or industry

• A deep understanding of AI models, including Diffusion Models, GANs, Transformers, or large language models, and can speak to their real-world application

• Adapted and fine-tuned pre-trained models to develop greater model control and quality

• Successfully worked with large-scale AI models in at least one of: image or video generation, audio (TTS, music generation, speech enhancement), or LLM training and alignment (RLHF, RLAIF, reward modelling). Direct video experience is a plus, not a requirement, if you can show strong transferable depth from image gen or LLM/RL/agentic work

• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch or Jax, and cloud computing platforms, ensuring efficient model training and deployment

• Clear communication, collaboration with kindness, and a value for knowledge-sharing and co-creation across teams

• Curiosity: always looking to stay ahead of industry trends by tracking AI literature, competitors, and emerging technologies

What's in it for you?
Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but you'll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a stack of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here's a taste of what's on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers
• An annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support your wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more
• Flexible leave options that empower you to be a force for good, take time to recharge and supports you personally

Check out  lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

All interviews are conducted virtually

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte!

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Where and how you can work
Our flagship campus is in Sydney. This role is preferred to be based out of our Sydney office, where the majority of this team is located.