AI Technical Program Manager (Localisation) - 12 month FTC

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Where and how you can work:

The buzzing Canva London campus features several buildings around beautiful leafy Hoxton Square in Shoreditch. While our global headquarters is in Sydney, Australia, London is our HQ for Europe, with all kinds of teams based here, plus event spaces to gather our team and communities. You’ll experience a warm welcome from our Vibe team at front of house, amazing home cooked food from our Head Chef and a variety of workspaces to hang out with your team mates or get solo work done. That said, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals and so you have choice in where and how you work.

About the Team:

Canva’s International Supergroup is responsible for driving growth and deepening adoption across our key regions worldwide. We are an entrepreneurial, cross‑functional team that turns bold strategy into culturally resonant execution. In each country, our mission is to empower all users to design and to make Canva one of the most beloved and culturally iconic brands in the country.

About the Role:

This is a senior specialist role within the Localisation Group where you will be partnering with country teams, product teams, and AI/ML stakeholders to build the technical infrastructure for LOTE at Canva as well as robust processes to make sure Canva is LOTE‑ready from the get go. You’ll drive the design and execution of evaluation frameworks, promote innovation across the team and automate systems that improve the quality, speed, and scalability of localisation across all markets. This is a hands‑on, high‑autonomy role for someone who loves building things that didn't exist before and has a knack for spinning multiple plates at once. You thrive in an environment where priorities shift, initiatives stack up, and no two weeks look the same. You'll be working at the intersection of LLMs and multilingual quality at scale figuring out how to evaluate AI translation across 100+ languages where human baselines are sparse, automating quality signals into CI/CD‑style workflows, and ensuring AI translation is good enough to ship.

What you’ll do:

• Partner with product, engineering, and machine learning teams to embed localisation quality signals earlier in the development cycle.
• Establish and maintain documentation on localisation AI tooling, prompt libraries, and evaluation methodologies.
• Lead the refinement of our AI translation pipeline, driving optimisation through prompt engineering and rigorous evaluation processes while determining the optimal balance between AI automation and human translation workflows.
• Contribute to the overall localisation strategy by surfacing data‑driven insights from evaluations and automation systems.
• Establish processes with country teams to propagate learnings across all regions and optimise operations.
• Create and iterate on team strategy, clearly communicating how that strategy rolls up into larger organisational goals and responding quickly to shifts in priorities and timelines.
• Build trust and collaborative culture with country teams and product teams within Canva and shape prioritisation.

What we’re looking for:

• You have deep expertise in localisation frameworks and technologies including LLM evals for translation (GPT‑4, Claude, Gemini, open‑source models like LLaMA).
• You are familiar with machine learning techniques (e.g. RAG, LoRA) and translation quality evaluation metrics (e.g. BLEU, COMET).
• You have a builder’s mindset, meaning you’re comfortable vibe coding scripts and generally just having a go at new things.
• You love taking things from chaos to clarity and you have the drive to see things through despite changes and setbacks.
• You understand how user experience impacts growth and you can connect the user journey to opportunities turning localisation initiatives into measurable signals.
• You are passionate about optimising LOTE user experience and you can create culturally grounded eval frameworks.
• You can document complex systems simply and clearly for broader audiences.
• Speaking multiple languages is a huge bonus.

Also, we’d love it if you had:

• Experience with Smartling or other CAT tools.
• An understanding of product growth.
• Some proficiency with SQL/data analysis.
• A tertiary education in linguistics, languages, or localisation.

What’s in it for you?

• Equity packages – we want our success to be yours too.
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents & carers.
• Annual Vibe & Thrive allowance to support wellbeing, social connection, office setup & more.
• Flexible leave options that let you recharge or take time to give back.