Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Canva AI (AU remote)

Company Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte!

Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. 

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney, with a second campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland, NZ. You have flexibility in how and where you work — whether that's 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, and we’re the team behind the intelligence that powers Canva’s AI experiences. From content generation to smart Q&A and brainstorming, we create the 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 their ideas to life with ease. The work we do is at the core of Canva’s success, and it plays a vital role in our ambition to become 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 that powers our conversational experiences, building on top of large models and designing scalable systems that can be used across the product.

This is a deeply hands-on role where you’ll be writing code, shaping features, and working 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.  If 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 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 supports you personally

Check out  lifeatcanva.com  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.

All our interviews are conducted virtually