Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Summary

Join Canva's Content Management & Distribution team as their first Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) to revolutionize their content management experience using AI. You will build multimodal content-understanding pipelines, design similarity search services, propose innovative AI features, and optimize for time-to-market, cost, quality, and latency. This role requires collaborating with cross-functional teams and mentoring other engineers. You'll be responsible for building and operating large-scale ML systems, leveraging your expertise in computer vision, language modeling, and LLMs. The ideal candidate possesses a product mindset and a passion for solving real-world challenges using AI. Canva offers a range of benefits, including equity packages, inclusive parental leave, a wellbeing allowance, and flexible leave options.

Requirements

• You have proven experience (5+ years) building and operating large-scale ML or recommender systems in production
• You possess deep knowledge of computer vision and language modeling; you’re comfortable training and fine-tuning CNNs, transformers, and other multimodal architectures
• You have hands-on expertise with LLMs, vector databases, and retrieval-augmented generation
• You have strong software engineering skills, with a focus on Python and ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, or scikit-learn
• You thrive in cross-functional teams and enjoy collaborating with engineers, UX designers, and PMs
• You have a product mindset—you optimize for user impact, make pragmatic trade-offs, and communicate clearly with non-technical partners
• You love solving real-world challenges by reducing friction and creating smart workflows through the use of AI

Responsibilities

• Build multimodal content‑understanding pipelines that detect people, objects, styles and scenes, turning every asset into richly tagged, high‑quality embeddings
• Design similarity search, grouping and organisation services at massive scale to power smart collections and clutter‑free libraries
• Propose innovative AI features and rapidly prototype them, diving into the trickiest system components to validate ideas and unblock the team
• Optimise for the right trade‑off—time‑to‑market, cost, quality and latency—scaling solutions from billions of public assets to pixel‑perfect subsets for enterprise brands
• Provide guidance and mentorship to other engineers in the Content Management & Distribution group, skilling them up in AI skills and helping them navigate technical challenges
• Guide the implementation of major projects, planning task breakdown and keeping engineers in sync using excellent verbal and written communication skills, including architectural diagrams
• Advocate for best practices that enhance our groups performance and reliability

Benefits

• 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