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 Engineer, you'll be at the heart of building the systems that turn Canva Research's breakthroughs into product. Your work will take research prototypes, whether in generative models, agents, evaluations, or on-device AI, and turn them into reliable, scalable technology that hundreds of millions of people use to create and tell stories.

We're open to a range of backgrounds for this role. You might come from generative model engineering (image, video or audio), agent systems and tool-use architectures, evaluation infrastructure, or on-device and systems optimisation. What matters most is strong production ML engineering and the judgement to know what "good enough to ship" looks like.

What you'll do

• Design and build the systems that turn generative research into product features: model serving, tool orchestration, data pipelines, or on-device deployment, depending on where you sit

• Build and evaluate how systems choose among models, editing primitives, retrieval, and external services, and how we measure when they chose well

• Own infrastructure for training, evaluation and deployment at scale: efficient data pipelines, distributed training, low-latency serving

• Drive the evals flywheel. Build offline and online evaluations that capture real quality and user intent, not just proxy metrics

• Ship to production with product teams, moving research prototypes into Canva features at a pace that keeps up with the model frontier

• Push the multimodal frontier in your area of depth, while staying fluent enough to collaborate across image, video, audio and text

• Optimise and scale models and pipelines for efficiency, latency and throughput across large distributed systems

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

You're likely a match if you have

• 5+ years of ML research or research engineering experience, with a track record of shipping models or ML-powered systems to production

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with experience building production-grade ML systems at scale

• Hands-on experience in at least one of: generative model training or serving (diffusion, GANs, transformers), agent architectures (planning, tool-use, memory), evaluation infrastructure, or on-device and systems optimisation

• Experience with large-scale distributed training and/or serving infrastructure, including data pipelines and cloud platforms

• Strong experimental instincts: tight baselines, clean ablations, data-backed conclusions

• Comfortable working across the research-to-production pipeline, translating academic breakthroughs into reliable, scalable systems

• Clear communication, collaboration with kindness, and comfort working with research scientists to turn ambiguous problems into concrete engineering plans

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

Nice to have

• Familiarity with multimodal data or models (image, video, audio, design assets)

• Experience designing evals for ML-powered products: LLM-as-judge, rubric-based eval, online quality metrics

• Open-source or published work in ML systems, agent systems, or multimodal research

• Prior work on creative tools, video or image editing, or design tooling

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 range 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
• Health benefits plans to support you and your wellbeing
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• 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 information.

Other stuff to know
We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills, merit and business needs, in compliance with applicable local laws. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

At Canva, we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. The target salary range for this position is $220,000 - $280,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.

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

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. 

Where and how you can work
Our head office is in Sydney, Australia, but San Francisco is now home to our US operations.  The role is listed as hybrid, meaning we are incredibly flexible and empower you to work where you prefer - whether that's at home or at the office.