About the Group/Team
We're the Productivity group within the Design Experience supergroup. We build the surfaces people use to organise and act on information in Canva: Sheets, Tables, Docs, Whiteboards, Presentations, Websites, and Email. Right now, we're focused on using AI to automate whole user flows, not just bolt on smart features. We want to invent what productivity looks like next, and rethink how the work actually gets done. We move fast and ship often, and we care about the details that make AI feel effortless. Our work touches millions of people every day, so getting it right matters.
About the Role/Specialty
This role drives AI strategy from a product perspective: identifying where ML and AI create the most value across Productivity's user journeys, and shaping how those AI-enabled experiences get built. A core current focus is toolifying existing Productivity functionality, wrapping it so LLMs and agents can use it to complete real user tasks. You will manage your time between scoping unstructured product and technical problems, setting patterns other engineers build on, partnering with product to shape where ML has impact, and mentoring engineers to raise the technical bar.
What you’ll do (responsibilities)
- Identify and drive where ML/AI creates the most value across Productivity's user journeys
- Toolify existing Productivity functionality so LLMs and agents can act on it
- Partner with product, design and other engineering teams to shape AI strategy for Productivity
- Set technical patterns and standards for how ML/AI gets applied and shipped across the team
- Unblock organisational-level technical challenges that a single team can't solve alone
- Mentor engineers and help raise the craft of applied ML engineering across the group
- Balance speed and rigour, shipping AI features that hold up at Canva's scale
- Translate shifts in user needs and the product roadmap into ML/AI priorities
- Set the AI direction for the Productivity group and empower engineers across teams to own delivery against it
What we're looking for:
You've got hands-on experience applying ML/AI to real product problems in production, and you're comfortable owning technical direction without needing everything handed to you. You're genuinely method-agnostic: as happy building a well-tuned classical model as adopting the latest technique, whatever gets the job done. You work well across teams, and you're just as happy influencing a roadmap as you are writing code. You're pragmatic: you'd rather ship something useful and iterate than chase a perfect model nobody uses. You want to find and drive where AI actually helps people get things done.
What the candidate will learn & how will they develop at Canva:
Apply ML at the scale of Canva's global user base, where a small improvement can change how millions of people work
Shape ML architecture and technical standards that get reused across the Design Experience supergroup
Own increasingly ambiguous, cross-team problems and build the judgement to set technical direction, not just execute against a brief
Mentor engineers and contribute to hiring, growing your ability to shape a team's technical bar
Sharpen your product instincts by measuring ML work against real usage and impact, not just model performance
