Senior Backend Engineer - Research Enablement

Canva

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Research Enablement EU team, part of Canva's AI research group, focuses on bridging the gap between research science and product. This involves taking models and experiments from research teams and making them production-ready, including owning model deployment and rollout pipelines, building and maintaining infrastructure and tooling for faster iteration, and running data collection systems for ML training. The team collaborates closely with AI Platform and research leads to scale Canva's generative AI capabilities. As a backend engineer in this team, you will partner with researchers and stakeholders in the Gen AI group to ensure experimental code is production-ready, build internal applications and services, and create tooling and processes for safe and quick deployment of multiple model variants. Your work will streamline the research-to-user loop, reduce duplication, and ensure ML features are reliable, observable, and easily adoptable by other teams.

Requirements

• Firmly grounded computer science and engineering fundamentals including concurrency, multithreading, data structures, solution design, architecture, and design patterns
• Strong background in designing, building and running large scale Java or Python backend systems
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment, taking ownership of projects and outcomes
• Experience with big-picture thinking and attention to detail
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

Nice To Haves

• Experience in Machine Learning is a huge plus
• SQL experience
• DynamoDB experience is a plus

Responsibilities

• Work on cutting-edge AI features at Canva and collaborate with teams to bring them to production effectively and ensure reliable performance at scale
• Participate in planning, development and maintenance of building blocks such as training data pipelines and internal tools like data visualisers and aggregators to support researchers in their end-to-end workflows
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders, PMs, and cross-functional teams to create innovative and scalable solutions
• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance, scalable, and reusable backend components
• Identify and implement best practices and methodologies for backend engineering
• Help foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement
• Participate in code reviews, ensuring adherence to coding standards and best practices
• Contribute to the overall architecture and design of backend systems, ensuring maintainability and extensibility

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed