Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Content Management & Distribution

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design

Hey, gday, 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. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have a choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you’d be doing in this role

This year the Content Management & Distribution team is on a mission to revolutionise their content management experience using AI. We ingest and manage billions of images, videos, documents and design elements, and we need state-of-the-art content understanding pipelines to transform them into rich, structured knowledge, and serve them instantly across search, recommendations and generative experiences.

As the first MLE in the team you will lay the technical foundations for our ML stack, set coding and experimentation standards, and deliver high‑impact models that power content discovery and personalisation across Canva.

What you’ll do

• 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.

You’re probably a good match if

• 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.

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 range 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.

We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva — so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above — we still want to hear from you!

We see AI as a powerful amplifier of creativity and technology at Canva.We’re evolving how we assess AI skills in our Technology hiring experience - you’ll tackle interactive, real-time challenges that reflect the kind of work we do. In some interviews, you may also be asked to solve a problem using an AI tool to show how you approach challenges with tech by your side. Your recruitment partner will walk you through what to expect.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.We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above - we still want to hear from you!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.