Senior Design Generation AI Scientist in Sydney

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

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):

• 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:

• Hands-on experience training generative models, ideally with exposure to image or design generation.
• Comfortable defining and moving the metrics that matter for generative quality.
• Ability to take a scoped, often ambiguous research problem from framing to a validated result with minimal guidance.
• Highly autonomous and comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with frontier research.
• Hands-on, practical experience fine-tuning large language and multimodal models (LLMs/MLLMs) at scale in an industrial research setting.
• Experience with wrangling large-scale data pipelines and designing novel training objectives.
• A PhD in AI, machine learning, or a related field, plus at least two years of strong hands-on industry experience, or at least 6 years of industry experience without a PhD.
• A background in diffusion or image generation is a bonus, not a requirement.

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 be 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 support you personally.

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.