Senior Research Scientist Generative Video

About the Role:

At Canva were building a future powered by AI thats as magical as it is impactful. As a Senior Research Scientist (Generative Video) youll help push the boundaries of video generation and editingturning cutting-edge research into practical scalable capabilities that empower millions of creators.

This role blends hands-on applied research with strong technical ownership. Youll design train and evaluate generative video models collaborate closely with engineering and product partners and help translate breakthroughs in video diffusion and multimodal learning into real-world experiences in Canva.

At the moment this role is focused on:

• Own and deliver research projects that advance Canvas generative video capabilities (text-to-video image-to-video video-to-video video editing).

• Design and run rigorous experiments to validate hypotheses improve quality controllability temporal coherence and runtime performance.

• Develop and improve model architectures and training pipelines for video generation including diffusion-based approaches and complementary techniques.

• Translate research into production impact by partnering with ML engineers to scale training/inference and integrate models into Canvas product ecosystem.

• Advance evaluation and benchmarking for generative video including perceptual quality motion fidelity temporal consistency identity preservation prompt adherence safety and robustness.

• Explore data strategies for video (curation filtering deduplication captioning/annotation synthetic data bootstrapped labeling) that improve model reliability and controllability.

• Contribute to the research roadmap by tracking emerging trends proposing new directions and identifying high-leverage problems in generative video.

• Share knowledge through internal write-ups talks cross-team reviews and (where appropriate) external publications or conference engagement.

Youre probably a match if you:

You thrive in ambiguity love connecting deep research to product outcomes and can independently drive meaningful research work from idea to deployment. You balance scientific rigor with practical delivery communicate clearly with cross-functional partners and have strong instincts for what will make models useful.

Were looking for someone who brings:

• Deep expertise in generative video modeling including strong familiarity with modern approaches such as:

• Video diffusion (latent diffusion for video spatiotemporal U-Nets/DiTs conditional diffusion guidance strategies scheduler choices).

• Temporal modeling techniques (3D/21D convs temporal attention factorized attention optical-flow-aware modeling recurrent/streaming approaches).

• Controllability methods (ControlNet-style conditioning for video pose/depth/segmentation conditioning motion control camera control keyframes masks and edit constraints).

• Consistency and identity preservation (subject-consistent generation reference-based conditioning feature/embedding locking token/adapter strategies multi-view constraints where relevant).

• Efficient training and adaptation (LoRA/adapters distillation latent-space tricks progressive training multi-stage pipelines mixed precision distributed training).

• Longer-horizon video generation strategies (hierarchical generation chunked/overlapped sampling latent caching frame interpolation consistency models or hybrid autoregressive diffusion pipelines).

In addition you have:

• Experience developing and deploying generative AI systems (video synthesis/editing strongly preferred; multimodal systems also valuable).

• Strong working knowledge of multimodal representation learning (video-text video-image VLM-style conditioning retrieval-augmented conditioning).

• A solid publication record or demonstrable research impact in industry (shipped systems patents open-source contributions or measurable product gains).

• Experience taking a research problem end-to-end

• Proficiency turning complex papers/ideas into robust implementations and evaluating them with scientific rigor.

• A collaborative mindset: you partner exceptionally well with engineering product design and other researchers.

Bonus points (nice to have)

• Experience with video editing models (inpainting/outpainting temporal-aware masking object removal background replacement stylization relighting).

• Familiarity with video safety and responsible gen-AI practices (content filtering watermarking provenance bias prompt abuse mitigation).

• Experience building human automated evaluation loops for generative video quality and preference optimization (reward models RLHF-style tuning DPO variants or preference learning).

• Understanding of inference optimization (quantization compilation batching KV cache strategies streaming generation GPU memory optimization).

What youll learn and how youll grow

• Deep involvement in Canvas long-term AI strategy for generative media and multimodal systems.

• Opportunities to mentor and strengthen our research culture through reviews best practices and technical leadership.

• Exposure to product impact at global scale (hundreds of millions of users).

• Dedicated time for self-driven research exploration and experimentation with strong pathways to ship outcomes.

Additional Information :

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 range 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
• Health benefits plans to support you and your wellbeing
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• 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 information.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience skills merit and business needs in compliance with applicable local laws. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you dont feel like your skills quite match whats listed above - we still want to hear from you!

When you apply please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

At Canva we value fairness and we strive to provide competitive market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. The target base salary range for this position is $230000 - $280000. When calculating offers we make salary decisions based on market data your experience levels and internal benchmarks of your peers in the same domain and job level.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time