As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Brand Templates team at Canva, you will lead the end-to-end development and deployment of production ML systems that enhance enterprise branding at scale. The role focuses on building intelligent systems using AI and LLMs to power template ranking, brandification, layout understanding, and metadata generation, directly supporting Canva's enterprise growth.
What You'll Do
- Developing ranking and recommendation models that identify high-performing team designs and suggest them as candidates for conversion into Brand Templates
- Building brandification pipelines at scale — automatically transforming marketplace templates to conform to an organisation's brand guidelines (colours, fonts, logos, imagery style) so they can be published as Brand Templates
- Building layout extraction and understanding systems that parse Canva's design format (CDF) to identify structural patterns, element relationships, and design intent — enabling downstream on-brand design generation
- Designing and productionising LLM-based pipelines for generating structured metadata (intent descriptions, content classifications) across large volumes of brand templates
- Running experiments (offline and online) to validate model effectiveness and measure impact on user outcomes
- Collaborating with the Templates Platform team and cross-functional partners to define data contracts, APIs, and integration patterns for ML features
- Contributing to the broader Brand System AI vision — exploring how ML can reason about brand guidelines, design constraints, and content structure to assist enterprise users
- Establishing ML best practices within the team: experiment tracking, model evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and documentation
What We're Looking For
- You have 5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying ML-powered features in production environments
- You are proficient with Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
- You have strong experience with NLP/NLU techniques — including working with LLMs, embeddings, semantic search, prompt engineering, RAG, or fine-tuning
- You have experience with document understanding, layout analysis, or structured data extraction from semi-structured formats
- You have experience building information retrieval, ranking, or recommendation systems
- You are skilled across the ML lifecycle: data processing, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring
- You have experience designing and running A/B experiments to measure feature impact
- You are comfortable operating independently as the ML technical lead within a product team, while collaborating deeply with engineers, PMs, and designers
- You have a strong product mindset — you prioritise ML solutions that improve user experience and drive measurable business outcomes
- You are committed to scalable, maintainable ML systems with clear metrics and impact tracking
- You follow disciplined coding practices, actively participate in code reviews, and set best-practice standards for peers
Nice to Have
- Experience with layout understanding, document parsing, or structured extraction from design/document formats
- Familiarity with embeddings and vector databases
- Experience with enterprise or B2B product contexts where brand consistency and governance matter
- Familiarity with GenAI platforms (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic)
- Experience with microservices architectures and large monorepos
- A Master's or PhD in a machine learning discipline
Technical Stack
- Python
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- LLMs
- embeddings
- semantic search
- prompt engineering
- RAG
- fine-tuning
- document understanding
- layout analysis
- structured data extraction
- information retrieval
- ranking systems
- recommendation systems
- A/B testing
- vector databases
- GenAI platforms
- microservices
- CDF (Canva Design Format)
Team & Environment
- Part of the Brand Templates team within the Branded Experience (BEX) group; collaborates with product managers, product designers, backend engineers, platform teams, and Templates Platform team
Work Mode
- Remote within Australia
Canva is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
