Senior Research Engineer Video Agents

About the role

In your role as Senior Research Engineer youll be at the heart of building the next generation of generative video and audio technology. Your work will push the boundaries of whats possible in AI-driven storytelling helping Canva users go from idea to finished video with tools that feel genuinely magical. By developing and shipping cutting-edge video generation models youll help redefine how hundreds of millions of people create and tell stories visually shaping one of the most exciting product frontiers in AI.

About the team

Our Video Storytelling team builds the agentic systems behind Canvas video product. We sit between our generative research teams and the millions of creators who use Canva to tell stories every day. Our job is to make video creation feel more like directing and less like editing.

Were hiring a Research Engineer to help define how Canvas video agents think plan and ship.

Youll work hands-on across the agent stack from planning and tool orchestration to memory evals and shipping. Youll partner closely with product design and our generative-models teams to turn research into reliable creator experiences.

What youll do

• Design the planning layer of our video agent: how it breaks a creative brief into a sequence of generation editing and asset decisions.

• Build and evaluate tool-use behaviours: how the agent chooses among video models editing primitives retrieval over a creators assets and external services and how we measure when it chose well.

• Own context and memory for multi-turn video sessions including long-running projects brand context and creator preferences.

• Drive the evals flywheel. Build offline and online evaluations that capture narrative quality and intent satisfaction not just model metrics.

• Ship to production with the product team. Move research prototypes into Canva features at a pace that keeps up with the model frontier.

• Push the multimodal frontier for storytelling across script image video audio and timeline structure.

What you bring

• 5 years of ML research or research engineering experience with a track record of shipping LLM-powered systems to production.

• Hands-on agent-building experience in at least one of: tool-use architectures planning loops memory and context management or agent evals.

• Strong Python and PyTorch. Comfortable in modern agent frameworks.

• Experience with multimodal models and a clear view of where they break inside larger systems.

• Strong experimental instincts: tight baselines clean ablations data-backed conclusions.

Nice to have

• Prior work on creative tools video editing or design tooling. Bonus if youre a regular user of creative tools yourself.

• Familiarity with diffusion and video generation models as inputs to an agent rather than as a trainer.

• Experience designing evals for LLM-powered products: LLM-as-judge rubric-based eval online quality metrics.

• Open-source or published work in agent systems multimodal reasoning or video understanding.

Additional Information :

Whats in it for you

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard - and we do - but youll 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.

Heres a taste of whats on offer:

• Equity packages - we want our success to be yours too
• Health benefits plans to support you and your wellbeing
• 401(k) retirement plan with company contribution
• 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 for more information.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience skills merit and business needs in compliance with applicable local laws. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you dont feel like your skills quite match whats listed above - we still want to hear from you!

When you apply please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

At Canva we value fairness and we strive to provide competitive market-informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. The target base salary range for this position is $220000 - $280000. When calculating offers we make salary decisions based on market data your experience levels and internal benchmarks of your peers in the same domain and job level.

 

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time