Senior Research Scientist - Design Generation (Sydney)

Canva
Sydney
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeFunction: Data Science & Machine LearningExperience: 2+ yearsEducation: phdSkills: ["Autonomy","Judgement","Communication","Knowledge sharing","Experiment design"]

Own end-to-end research for design generation at Canva, training and evaluating generative models that create and understand design content. Lead experiments to test model architecture, training approaches, and data; build evaluation methods, benchmarks, and metrics that reflect real user quality. Diagnose model quality and failure modes, translate research into production-ready techniques, and collaborate with product teams to ship improvements to 250M+ users.

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Canva
Canva
2 days ago

Senior Research Scientist - Design Generation (Sydney)

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Job Summary

Own end-to-end research for design generation at Canva, training and evaluating generative models that create and understand design content. Lead experiments to test model architecture, training approaches, and data; build evaluation methods, benchmarks, and metrics that reflect real user quality. Diagnose model quality and failure modes, translate research into production-ready techniques, and collaborate with product teams to ship improvements to 250M+ users.
Location: Sydney
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Data Science & Machine Learning
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Train and evaluate generative models for design generation, improving how Canva creates and understands design content.
  • •Design and run experiments to test hypotheses about model architecture, training approaches, and data.
  • •Build and improve evaluation methods and benchmarks to measure 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, and communicate findings and trade-offs clearly.

Pay and Benefits

Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:EquityParental LeaveWellness StipendHome Office

Key Requirements

  • •Hands-on experience training generative models for design generation, with exposure to image or design generation (not just applying pretrained models).
  • •Comfort defining and improving metrics for generative quality, taking a scoped research problem from framing to validated results with minimal guidance.
  • •Practical experience fine-tuning large language and multimodal models (LLMs/MLLMs) at scale in an industrial research setting.
  • •Experience with large-scale data pipelines, designing novel training objectives, and training/evaluating across multi-GPU setups.
  • •PhD in AI, machine learning, or a related field plus at least two years of industry experience (or no PhD with at least 6 years industry experience).
Experience:2+ yearsGenerative AIMultimodalImage generation
Education:PhD / Doctorate in AI, machine learning, or related field
Skills:AutonomyJudgementCommunicationKnowledge sharingExperiment design
Languages:English
Tech Stack:Generative modelsLLMsMLLMsMultimodal modelsImage generationDiffusionMulti-GPUTraining objectivesBenchmarksDatasetsData pipelinesEvaluation methods

Company Brief

Canva
Canva is an online visual communications platform that provides drag-and-drop design tools, templates, and media assets for creating presentations, social media graphics, videos, documents and more, serving individuals and large enterprises globally.
Industry: Enterprise Software
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Revenue: USD 1B+
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Decacorn (USD 10B+)
Funding: Series E+
Headquarters: Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
Founded: 2012
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 3.9
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