Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Canva AI (ANZ remote)

Canva Pty Ltd

Job Overview

Location

Sydney

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead the architecture and implementation of Canva’s next-generation conversational AI platform, enabling millions of users to design, write, and ideate through natural language. You will own the full lifecycle—from research spikes and rapid prototypes to globally distributed, low-latency production systems that handle tens of thousands of requests per second.
• Design and continuously evolve a flexible, multi-tenant LLM orchestration layer that abstracts away model-specific quirks while exposing clean APIs to dozens of product teams. Your platform will power everything from one-click “Magic Write” suggestions to complex multi-turn brainstorming sessions, all without bespoke integrations.
• Fine-tune, evaluate, and guardrail large language models (open-source and proprietary) to balance creativity, safety, and cost. You will run offline experiments, online A/B tests, and reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback loops to push quality metrics like helpfulness, relevance, and hallucination rate.
• Ship production-grade Java and Python services that integrate with Canva’s microservice mesh, leveraging Kubernetes, Kafka, and DynamoDB for elastic scale. You will profile GPU/CPU inference latencies, optimize token streaming, and implement caching strategies that shave milliseconds off user-perceived response times.
• Champion industry standards such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) to future-proof our stack and enable third-party extensibility. You will publish internal SDKs, sample notebooks, and golden-path templates so any Canva squad can spin up an AI feature in days, not months.
• Collaborate daily with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to translate fuzzy user problems into crisp ML specs. You will run design sprints, story-mapping workshops, and “AI office hours” to keep the entire company fluent in what’s technically possible today—and what’s just around the corner.
• Mentor and level-up a growing team of ML and backend engineers through pair programming, architecture reviews, and lightning talks. You will establish coding standards, MLOps playbooks, and on-call rotations that raise the bar for reliability and experimentation velocity across the group.
• Contribute to Canva’s open-source presence by publishing research, releasing tooling, and speaking at conferences. Your work will directly influence how the world thinks about ethical, user-centric AI in creative software.

🎯 Requirements

• 5+ years production experience shipping ML-powered products, including at least 2 years focused on conversational or generative AI systems
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and Java (or Kotlin), with a track record of writing clean, testable backend code at web scale
• Deep understanding of transformer architectures, fine-tuning techniques (LoRA, RLHF), and evaluation frameworks for large language models
• Demonstrated ability to design and operate distributed systems on AWS/GCP, including containerization (Docker/K8s), autoscaling, and CI/CD pipelines
• Nice-to-have: contributions to open-source LLM tooling, experience with MCP/A2A protocols, or advanced degrees in NLP/ML

🏖️ Benefits

• Work from anywhere in Australia or New Zealand with full remote flexibility and a generous home-office setup budget
• Competitive equity package plus annual performance bonus, ensuring you share directly in Canva’s continued global growth
• 18 weeks paid parental leave, wellness allowance, and Vibe & Thrive days—extra paid leave to recharge and pursue personal passions
• Annual learning & development stipend, conference attendance, and dedicated “Innovation Days” to experiment with bleeding-edge AI tech

Skills & Technologies

Java

Senior

Onsite

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Canva Pty Ltd

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About Canva Pty Ltd

Canva is an Australian graphic-design platform providing a web-based and mobile application for creating social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. It offers templates, stock photography, illustrations, fonts and drag-and-drop functionality through a freemium subscription model serving consumers, small businesses, educators and large enterprises. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Sydney, the company operates globally with offices in Manila, Beijing and Austin, and supports over 100 languages.

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