At Canva, our mission is to empower the world to design. To ensure our generative AI models are truly helpful, we are seeking a talented Research Engineer to build our next-generation evaluation system by leveraging automatic evaluations.
You will engineer sophisticated AI agents that can automatically assess the quality and human alignment of our generative design models. This high-impact role focuses on building the practical systems that make cutting-edge research effective, to provide a rapid feedback loop that guides the future of design generation at Canva, ultimately empowering millions of users to create.
Agentic Evaluation Systems: Engineering autonomous AI agents that use Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to evaluate the quality, relevance, and human alignment of generated designs.
Inference-Time Alignment: Mastering techniques that improve model outputs without full retraining, but by inference-based methods including prompt engineering, in-context learning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Model Benchmarking & Analysis: Building a rigorous framework to systematically benchmark internal and external quality understanding models, delivering clear, data-driven insights on human alignment.
Design, build, and optimize the infrastructure for an "MLLM-as-a-Judge" evaluation system for scalable, automated feedback.
Implement and experiment with inference-time alignment techniques (Prompt Engineering, RAG, ICL) to directly improve model output quality.
Establish and manage a comprehensive benchmarking process to compare various foundation models on design-centric tasks.
Analyze evaluation data to identify model failure modes and provide actionable recommendations to the research team.
Collaborate with research scientists and ML engineers to integrate the agentic judge system into the model development lifecycle.
Translate the latest research in LLM evaluation and agentic AI into practical, production-ready engineering solutions.
You have a strong understanding of generative AI models (e.g., Diffusion Models, GANs, Transformers) and their architectures, with practical experience that informs robust evaluation strategies
Excel at creating data-driven evaluation methodologies, turning user analytics into clear, actionable insights.
You’ve successfully managed or optimized large-scale distributed model training across hundreds of GPUs
You have a solid understanding of machine learning, have worked with PyTorch and know how to optimize such codes for speed
You have disciplined coding practices, and are experienced with code reviews and pull requests.
You have experience working in cloud environments, ideally AWS
Familiarity with evaluation libraries and frameworks.
Experience building or working with agentic AI systems or multi-agent coordination.
Knowledge of data visualization tools to communicate findings effectively.
A background or interest in human-computer interaction, design principles.
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.
Check out lifeatcanva.com for more information.
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.
At Canva, we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience and our overall assessment of what we observed and learnt in the hiring process. The target base salary range for this position is $220,000 - $280,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data, your experience levels, and internal benchmarks of your peers in the same domain and job level.
Please note that interviews are predominantly conducted virtually.
Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
Hey, hello, 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.
Our flagship office is in Sydney, Australia, but we've made our way from down under, to a hub in San Francisco, which is now home to our US operations. We offer flexibility in how and where you work. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.
Originally posted on Himalayas
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