Company Description

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 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.

Job Description

About the Role:

As a Staff Research (Machine Learning) Engineer, you will shape the next generation of intelligent design experiences at Canva. This role sits at the intersection of applied research, large-scale ML engineering, and technical leadership. You will drive foundational advances in multimodal AI (especially audio & video) and turn cutting-edge research into impactful, production-ready capabilities used by millions. Your technical judgment, architectural direction, and hands-on implementation will elevate Canva’s generative AI capabilities and accelerate our mission to empower the world to design.

You will operate as a senior technical leader: defining strategy, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, influencing long-term ML roadmaps, and raising the bar for engineering and research excellence across the organisation.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Partnering deeply with Research Scientists to explore, validate, and productionize advances in audio, video, and multimodal generation—driving the transition from conceptual research to robust, real-world systems.

• Leading rapid prototyping efforts to evaluate novel architectures, algorithms, and training approaches, enabling fast iteration and research acceleration.

• Designing and owning end-to-end ML systems, including innovative model architectures for generative and analytic tasks across audio, video, and multimodal domains.

• Building and scaling production-grade ML pipelines, ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and smooth integration into Canva’s ecosystem (training, fine-tuning, deployment, continuous evaluation, monitoring).

• Optimizing large-scale models and infrastructure, improving efficiency, latency, and throughput across distributed training and inference environments.

• Establishing high-quality datasets and annotation pipelines to support multimodal learning at scale, including defining standards for data quality, diversity, and evaluation.

• Collaborating cross-functionally with product, engineering, design, research, and platform teams to deliver solutions that are technically sound, high-impact, and aligned with broader company goals.

• Providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers and researchers, influencing long-term strategy, and setting best practices across the ML organization.

You’re likely a great match if you:

• Have deep expertise in state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., diffusion models, GANs, transformers) and a strong track record of applying them to real-world products or research outcomes.

• Have led or executed large-scale distributed training (spanning hundreds of GPUs) and can articulate infrastructure, performance, and cost tradeoffs at scale.

• Bring a strong foundation in ML and deep learning, with mastery in frameworks like PyTorch for implementing, optimizing, and scaling complex models.

• Demonstrate exceptional engineering rigor: clean, maintainable code; modular architectures; strong testing culture; CI/CD maturity; observability best practices.

• Thrive in ambiguous, high-velocity environments, take full ownership of end-to-end solutions, and consistently drive toward pragmatic, scalable outcomes.

• Communicate with clarity, foster collaborative environments, and invest in knowledge-sharing and technical mentorship.

• Have hands-on experience working with large-scale audio or video datasets (TB/PB), including preprocessing, representation learning, and perceptual evaluation methodologies.

Additional Information

Don't tick all the boxes? Don't worry about that - nobody does!

We’d still love to hear from you! At Canva, we know that great engineers come from a variety of backgrounds, and we value passion, curiosity, and a willingness to learn just as much as specific experience. If you're excited about this role but don’t tick every box, we encourage you to apply, you might a great fit in ways you didn’t expect!

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.