Overview
Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. We're Canva, with a flagship campus in Sydney and a second campus in Melbourne, plus co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland, NZ. You have flexibility in how and where you work—from one of our spaces, from home, or a mix of both. This role is remote-friendly within Australia or New Zealand, so you can choose the setup that empowers you and your team to do your best work.
Job Description
About the team
We are the Canva AI Group, the team behind the intelligence that powers Canva's AI experiences. From content generation to smart Q&A and brainstorming, we create end-to-end journeys that make AI feel intuitive, magical, and useful. Our vision is to create the most natural and powerful conversational experience for our users – helping them design, write, ideate, and bring ideas to life with ease. The work we do is at the core of Canva's success and supports our ambition to be the world's leading visual communication platform.
About the role
We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help reimagine how people interact with Canva. You'll work on the AI powering our conversational experiences, building on large models and designing scalable systems that can be used across the product. This is a deeply hands-on role where you'll write code, shape features, and work side by side with software engineers. You'll take ideas from prototype to production, partnering with teams across Canva to deliver ML-driven features that feel seamless and genuinely helpful. If you're excited about crafting AI that feels human, useful, and empowering, and you want to work on something that touches millions of users every day, please apply today.
What you will be doing
* Building a truly flexible and scalable conversational AI platform, designed to serve diverse use cases without custom implementations (designing modular architecture, scalable model serving, configurable workflows)
* Fine-tuning and evaluating LLM-based models to improve performance, efficiency, and user experience
* Contributing to platform engineering across both ML and backend systems—this is a highly hands-on role
* Exploring integrations with industry-standard tools and best practices like MCP and A2A
* Collaborating with cross-functional teams to define and deliver impactful AI features
* Mentoring other Machine Learning Engineers and lifting engineering quality and excellence
You're probably a match if
* You bring a strong bias for action and a product-minded approach to engineering
* You love getting hands-on, working side-by-side with software engineers, writing Python production code (including Java Backend where needed), and solving complex engineering problems
* You have deep experience building and deploying ML-powered products, particularly in conversational AI
* You enjoy influencing roadmap decisions and thrive in ambiguous environments
* You're passionate about keeping up with the rapidly evolving AI space and proactively experiment with emerging techniques
Additional Information
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 big goals motivates us to work hard – and we do – but you'll experience moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva. We also offer a stack of benefits to set you up for 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
Life at Canva: lifeatcanva.com
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 our interviews are conducted virtually.
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