About Canva
Canva's mission is to empower the world to design. Machine learning is central to that: the ranking and search systems that help people find their content, the generative models that create designs from scratch, the pipelines that decide which model serves which request, and the infrastructure that turns research breakthroughs into features hundreds of millions of people use. Our ML engineers sit across product and platform teams (spanning Discovery, Generative AI, and Platform groups), each owning a distinct slice of how ML shows up for Canva's users.

About the role
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you'll take a scoped ML problem and own it end to end: framing it, building and evaluating the solution, shipping it, and measuring the real-world impact. Depending on the team, that could mean ranking and relevance models, generative pipelines and model selection, or turning research prototypes into production-grade systems. What's constant is the level of ownership: you'll operate with minimal guidance, bring your own judgement to how a problem should be solved, and work closely with researchers, product engineers, and platform teams to get there.

What you'll do

• Build, evaluate, and ship ML systems in production, not just in a notebook, whether that's ranking, relevance, generation, or evaluation infrastructure

• Own a well-scoped project from problem framing through to shipped, measurable impact, with minimal guidance

• Work through real production trade-offs (quality, cost, latency) when choosing, integrating, or improving models

• Investigate and resolve quality, relevance, or reliability regressions in live systems

• Partner with research, product, and platform engineers to translate ambiguous problems into concrete, shippable plans

• Communicate technical trade-offs clearly, including to non-technical stakeholders, and share knowledge across your team

You're likely a match if you have

• Hands-on experience shipping ML systems to production at scale, not just training models in isolation

• The ability to define and move the metrics that actually matter for your domain, rather than optimising model accuracy alone

• A track record of taking a scoped project from idea to shipped with minimal guidance

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and fluency in a modern ML stack (Python, PyTorch or similar)

• High autonomy and comfort with ambiguity as products, models, and priorities evolve

• Clear communication and strong cross-functional collaboration skills

Nice to have

• Depth in one or more of: search and ranking systems, generative model evaluation/integration, distributed training or inference optimisation, MLOps

• Experience working on systems used by millions of people

• A history of shipping ML-powered product features end to end, not just research outputs

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.