[Hiring] Senior Research Data Engineer @Canva

Role Description

At Canva, our mission is to empower the world to design. We’re building AI that feels magical and lands real impact for millions of people - helping anyone create with confidence. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to own the data foundations that power our multimodal agent research—building the pipelines, datasets, and tooling that turn ambitious research ideas into trainable reality.

About the team

• Explore multimodal agentic architectures.
• Build scalable training and evaluation loops.
• Partner closely with product and platform teams to turn breakthroughs into delightful product features.
• Develop new multimodal agentic systems.
• Work on all topics of multimodal modelling, pre/post-training, and design agents.

What you'll do

• Design and build data pipelines for agent training: collection, filtering, deduplication, formatting, and versioning across text, image, and multimodal sources.
• Build and maintain infrastructure for efficient data loading, storage, and retrieval at scale (S3, distributed systems, streaming pipelines).
• Collaborate with research scientists to translate research requirements into concrete data specifications, and iterate as experiments reveal new needs.
• Create evaluation datasets and benchmarks in collaboration with researchers—curating task distributions that surface real failure modes.
• Develop tooling for dataset construction—including human annotation workflows, synthetic data generation, and preference data collection for RLHF/DPO-style training.
• Own data quality: build validation frameworks, monitor for drift and contamination, and establish standards that make datasets trustworthy and reproducible.
• Document datasets thoroughly: provenance, known limitations, intended use cases, and versioning history.
• Implement comprehensive test coverage for data pipelines and ML workflows, ensuring reliability and catching regressions early.
• Elevate codebase quality through code reviews, refactoring, and establishing engineering best practices that help research velocity scale sustainably.
• Contribute to team roadmaps by identifying data bottlenecks and proposing solutions that unblock research velocity.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with experience building production-grade data pipelines and ML DevOps.
• Practical experience with prompt engineering—designing, testing, and refining prompts for reliable LLM/VLM outputs.
• Experience with ML data workflows: large-scale data processing and loading (Ray, or similar), data versioning, and format considerations for training (tokenization, batching, sharding).
• Hands-on experience working with data pipelines for large-scale distributed ML training runs.
• Familiarity with annotation tooling and human-in-the-loop data collection (Label Studio or internal systems).
• Understanding of ML training requirements—you know what "good data" looks like for LLM/VLM fine-tuning and can anticipate downstream issues.
• Experience loading and writing large datasets to/from cloud infrastructure (AWS) and distributed storage systems.
• Strong communication skills: you can work with researchers to scope ambiguous problems and translate needs into actionable plans.
• A collaborative approach, comfortable taking ownership and iterating quickly.

Nice to have

• Experience with preference data collection for RLHF or reward modelling.
• Familiarity with multimodal data (image-text pairs, video, design assets).
• Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines using LLMs.
• Background in data quality metrics and monitoring systems.
• Contributions to dataset releases or benchmarks in the ML community.

Additional 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.
• 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.
• Recruitment type: Permanent.