Job Description

About the Group/Team

You’ll join the Product Enablement Team, part of the International Supergroup, which is focused on accelerating Canva’s growth and feature adoption in priority international markets. The team partners closely with Global AI, Search, and Recommendations teams to bring cutting-edge capabilities to local markets with the right technical customizations and data insights.

In particular, this role will focus on enhancing Search and Recommendation and AI Magic experiences in China, adapting algorithms to local content trends, user behaviors, and regulatory requirements. The team works on local model fine-tuning, data signal enhancements, and experimentation to deliver measurable impact.

About the Role/Specialty

We’re looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) with strong backend and applied ML experience, ideally in generative AI, search or recommendation systems. You’ll work at the intersection of AI research and product delivery — owning the development, deployment, and iteration of models that shape the user journey. You’ll also play a key role in improving the training data pipeline, online experimentation, and integration with global systems.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

• Work with local AI models and services (e.g., LLMs, image/video generation models, Rec Systems) to support Canva's product needs in China, with guidance from senior engineers.
• Assist in fine-tuning and prompt engineering of models using localized datasets and usage signals.
• Build and maintain data pipelines and model-serving components that support scalable, region-compliant deployment of AI systems.
• Collaborate with global and local teams across ML, product, infra, legal, and compliance to deliver on project goals.
• Run offline evaluations and support online experimentation to measure model performance and user impact.
• Contribute to technical discussions and share learnings with the Product Enablement and broader AI teams.

Qualifications

What we're looking for

• 1–3 years of ML or software engineering experience (internships and academic projects count).
• Familiarity with at least one area of production ML — such as LLMs, search, recommendation, or generative AI.
• Solid coding skills in Python, with hands-on experience using ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, or similar.
• Exposure to or interest in Chinese AI models, vendors, or datasets is a plus.
• Foundational understanding of modern ML practices, including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, data processing, and model evaluation.
• Good communication and collaboration skills — comfortable working across distributed teams and asking the right questions.
• Some experience with cloud platforms or ML infrastructure (e.g., containerization, GPU serving) is a bonus.
• A product mindset and curiosity about solving real user problems with AI.

Additional Information

What the candidate will learn and

how will they develop at Canva

• Deepen your experience building agentic conversational AI systems
• Drive high-impact initiatives that directly support Canva’s 1B user mission
• Mentor across the ML community and grow your cross-functional influence
• Shape Canva’s future in ML-powered user interaction and automation