Engineering Manager - AI Platform (m/f/x)

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Servus, hey, 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.

Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney, Australia but Austria is home to part of our European operations. And you have 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.

Fun fact, a big part of our Austrian operations is developing the AI product within Canva to help reimagine how artificial intelligence can be used in design. Pretty cool ha!

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that’s all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you’ll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Partner with AI research leadership to understand research roadmaps and proactively identify platform capabilities needed for upcoming initiatives
• Coordinate with platform capability teams (Inference, Evaluation, Dataset & Training) to ensure seamless researcher experience across the full ML lifecycle
• Owning and driving the delivery of large, cross-team, and cross-group initiatives and projects from ideation to completion, with autonomy and independence of decision making.
• Coaching a team of 6+ engineers by providing regular, practical feedback and collaboratively help them reach their personal growth goals.
• Owning the team’s development methodology and rituals such as sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives.
• Collaborating with the Product Manager to understand and contribute to the roadmap
• Plan goals and define success metrics to ensure there is alignment between the company, group, and teams.
• Champion a culture of knowledge sharing and communication across engineering and effectively advocate for ML engineering needs to stakeholders within Canva.
• Run hiring and resourcing needs, including resourcing for the execution of the roadmap.

You’re probably a match if

• You have a history of success in technical people leadership and mentorship of engineers.
• You have the ability to work effectively across timezones (particularly EU/AU coordination) and bring excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• You have experience of platform engineering, designing and building complex, distributed systems, ideally involving Machine Learning.
• You can showacase first principles thinking - use deep understanding of a problem space to make informed decisions. Even if these decisions are radically different from what others might be doing, Canva is a unique company, solving unique problems and this sometimes requires us to make bold decisions.
• You bring a deep passion for platform engineering & empowering engineering to create business value.
• You have excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to break large projects down into smaller ones and deliver on them through others.
• You have proven expertise in inspiring others to achieve their full potential and enable the engineers within your team to do novel, impactful work.
• You are a continuous learner attitude who relishes global-scale challenges and solutions.

About the team

Canva’s AI Platform Group serves as the foundation for AI innovation across the company, supporting MLEs and researchers from CORE and wider across all of Canva. The AI Enablement teams provide critical hands-on support to researchers and AI builders globally, helping them navigate platform capabilities, optimise workflows, and accelerate from experimentation to production. These teams bridge the gap between cutting-edge research needs and platform capabilities, currently supporting initiatives like Project Celestial, Turkey, and the buddy programme for researcher onboarding, whilst ensuring coverage across our global research centres.

We’re seeking an engineering manager who can navigate the unique challenges of supporting research teams whilst maintaining platform excellence. You’ll lead a team that operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and production systems, requiring both technical depth in ML/data systems and the ability to balance reactive support with proactive platform development. This role requires someone who thrives in ambiguity, can context-switch between urgent researcher needs and long-term platform strategy, and has the diplomatic skills to manage stakeholder expectations across multiple research teams with competing priorities.

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.

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 starting salary for this position is 85,000 EUR gross/year. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data and candidates' skills and experience.

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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.