Senior Research Data Engineer

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Our global HQ is in Sydney, Australia, but our London campus sits in Hoxton Square, right in the middle of Shoreditch. It's a space where our UK team comes together to connect, create and collaborate. This role is based in London. Our hybrid way of working gives you flexibility — you'll have the option to work from home as well as connecting and collaborating with your team in-person, on campus.

At Canva, our mission is to empower the world to design. We’re building AI that feels magical and lands real impact for millions of people - helping anyone create with confidence. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to own the data foundations that power our multimodal agent research—building the pipelines, datasets, and tooling that turn ambitious research ideas into trainable reality.

About the team: We explore multimodal agentic architectures, build scalable training and evaluation loops, and partner closely with product and platform teams to turn breakthroughs into delightful product features. We are a cutting-edge research team, developing new multimodal agentic systems.

About the role: You'll be responsible for the data lifecycle that fuels our agent research: from collection and curation through to preprocessing, quality assurance, and delivery into training pipelines. You'll work closely with research scientists to understand what data is needed, then design and build the systems to make it happen—reliably and at scale.

What you'll do:

• Design and build data pipelines for agent training: collection, filtering, deduplication, formatting, and versioning across text, image, and multimodal sources.
• Build and maintain infrastructure for efficient data loading, storage, and retrieval at scale (S3, distributed systems, streaming pipelines).
• Collaborate with research scientists to translate research requirements into concrete data specifications, and iterate as experiments reveal new needs.
• Create evaluation datasets and benchmarks in collaboration with researchers—curating task distributions that surface real failure modes.
• Develop tooling for dataset construction—including human annotation workflows, synthetic data generation, and preference data collection for RLHF/DPO-style training.
• Own data quality: build validation frameworks, monitor for drift and contamination, and establish standards that make datasets trustworthy and reproducible.
• Document datasets thoroughly: provenance, known limitations, intended use cases, and versioning history.
• Implement comprehensive test coverage for data pipelines and ML workflows, ensuring reliability and catching regressions early.
• Elevate codebase quality through code reviews, refactoring, and establishing engineering best practices that help research velocity scale sustainably.
• Contribute to team roadmaps by identifying data bottlenecks and proposing solutions that unblock research velocity.

You're likely a match if you have:

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with experience building production-grade data pipelines and ML DevOps.
• Practical experience with prompt engineering—designing, testing, and refining prompts for reliable LLM/VLM outputs.
• Experience with ML data workflows: large-scale data processing and loading (Ray, or similar), data versioning, and format considerations for training (tokenization, batching, sharding).
• Hands-on experience working with data pipelines for large-scale distributed ML training runs.
• Familiarity with annotation tooling and human-in-the-loop data collection (Label Studio or internal systems).
• Understanding of ML training requirements—you know what 'good data' looks like for LLM/VLM fine-tuning and can anticipate downstream issues.
• Experience loading and writing large datasets to/from cloud infrastructure (AWS) and distributed storage systems.
• Strong communication skills: you can work with researchers to scope ambiguous problems and translate needs into actionable plans.
• A collaborative approach, comfortable taking ownership and iterating quickly.

Nice to have:

• Experience with preference data collection for RLHF or reward modelling.
• Familiarity with multimodal data (image-text pairs, video, design assets).
• Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines using LLMs.
• Background in data quality metrics and monitoring systems.
• Contributions to dataset releases or benchmarks in the ML community.

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. 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.