Senior Research Scientist - Design Generation (Sydney)

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. 

About the Group/Team

Canva Research sits within Canva's Generative AI supergroup, home to Canva's original AI research. The Design Generation team's mission is to empower Canva to do AI magic in the design space, building the generative models and techniques that power AI-assisted design creation for hundreds of millions of users.

About the Role/Specialty

As a Senior Research Scientist on Design Generation, you'll work on the generative modelling problems behind how Canva creates and understands design content. That means training and evaluating design generation models at scale - from wrangling large-scale datasets, crafting training objectives that draw out the most from this data to improve design quality, evaluating them on criteria that users actually care about, and working with product teams to help ship those models to 250M+ users. You’ll take ownership of scoped research projects end-to-end, from framing an open problem through to a shipped or clearly validated result.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Train and evaluate generative models like LLMs for design generation
• Design and run experiments to test hypotheses about model architecture, training approach, and data
• Build and improve evaluation methods and benchmarks for measuring generative design quality
• Translate research findings into techniques and approaches the team can move toward production
• Investigate model quality issues, failure modes, and gaps against user and business needs
• Stay current with generative modelling research and bring relevant advances into the team's work
• Communicate research findings and trade-offs clearly, including to non-research stakeholders, and share knowledge across the team

What we're looking for:

You've got hands-on experience training generative models, ideally with exposure to image ordesigngeneration, not just applying pretrained models off the shelf. You're comfortable defining and moving the metrics that matter for generative quality, not just chasing benchmark numbers in isolation. You can take a scoped, often ambiguous research problem from framing to a validated result with minimal guidance, bringing your own judgement to how it should be approached. You're highly autonomous, comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with frontier research, and you want your work to show up in something real people use every day.

• You've got hands-on, practical experience fine-tuning large language and multimodal models (LLMs/MLLMs) at scale in an industrial research setting.
• You know the tricks of the trade: wrangling large-scale data pipelines, designing novel training objectives that extract the most from the data to improve design quality, and training and evaluating across multi-GPU setups
• You've got a PhD in AI, machine learning, or a related field, plus at least two years of strong hands-on industry experience. We will also consider candidates without a PhD, but with at least 6 years of industry experience.
• A background in diffusion or image generation is a bonus, not a requirement — the core need here is language and multimodal LLM depth

What You'll Learn & Build:

• Deep experience researching and training generative models for design at Canva's scale
• Exposure to how research, product, and infra decisions intersect across Canva Research and the wider Generative AI supergroup
• The chance to work on frontier generative modelling problems as the space develops

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.

All interviews are conducted virtually