Staff Research Engineer Audio & Video AI

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 Canvas 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 Youll Be Doing:

• Partnering deeply with Research Scientists to explore validate and productionize advances in audio video and multimodal generationdriving 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 Canvas 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.

Youre 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 :

Dont tick all the boxes Dont worry about that - nobody does!  

Wed 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 youre excited about this role but dont tick every box we encourage you to apply you might a great fit in ways you didnt expect!

Whats in it for you

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but youll 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.

Heres a taste of whats 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   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.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time