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

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.

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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

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

Our global HQ is in Sydney, Australia, but our London campus sits in Hoxton Square, right in the middle of Shoreditch. It's a bit of a warren of stairs and rooms — you will get lost at first, and someone will happily give you a tour. It's a space where our UK team comes together to connect, create and collaborate.

Fun fact: our London team is one of the places where the AI powering Canva gets built.

This role is based in London. Our hybrid way of working gives you flexibility — you'll have the option to work from home as well as connecting and collaborating with your team in-person, on campus. We trust teams to choose the balance that empowers them to achieve their goals.