Senior Research Scientist - Generative Video

Canva • San Francisco, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

At Canva, we’re building a future powered by AI that’s as magical as it is impactful. As a Senior Research Scientist (Generative Video), you’ll help push the boundaries of video generation and editing—turning cutting-edge research into practical, scalable capabilities that empower millions of creators. This role blends hands-on applied research with strong technical ownership. You’ll design, train, and evaluate generative video models, collaborate closely with engineering and product partners, and help translate breakthroughs in video diffusion and multimodal learning into real-world experiences in Canva. At the moment, this role is focused on:

Requirements

• You thrive in ambiguity, love connecting deep research to product outcomes, and can independently drive meaningful research work from idea to deployment.
• You balance scientific rigor with practical delivery, communicate clearly with cross-functional partners, and have strong instincts for what will make models useful.
• Deep expertise in generative video modeling, including strong familiarity with modern approaches such as: Video diffusion (latent diffusion for video, spatiotemporal U-Nets/DiTs, conditional diffusion, guidance strategies, scheduler choices). Temporal modeling techniques (3D/2+1D convs, temporal attention, factorized attention, optical-flow-aware modeling, recurrent/streaming approaches). Controllability methods (ControlNet-style conditioning for video, pose/depth/segmentation conditioning, motion control, camera control, keyframes, masks, and edit constraints). Consistency and identity preservation (subject-consistent generation, reference-based conditioning, feature/embedding locking, token/adapter strategies, multi-view constraints where relevant). Efficient training and adaptation (LoRA/adapters, distillation, latent-space tricks, progressive training, multi-stage pipelines, mixed precision, distributed training). Longer-horizon video generation strategies (hierarchical generation, chunked/overlapped sampling, latent caching, frame interpolation, consistency models, or hybrid autoregressive + diffusion pipelines).
• Experience developing and deploying generative AI systems (video synthesis/editing strongly preferred; multimodal systems also valuable).
• Strong working knowledge of multimodal representation learning (video-text, video-image, VLM-style conditioning, retrieval-augmented conditioning).
• A solid publication record or demonstrable research impact in industry (shipped systems, patents, open-source contributions, or measurable product gains).
• Experience taking a research problem end-to-end
• Proficiency turning complex papers/ideas into robust implementations and evaluating them with scientific rigor.
• A collaborative mindset: you partner exceptionally well with engineering, product, design, and other researchers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with video editing models (inpainting/outpainting, temporal-aware masking, object removal, background replacement, stylization, relighting).
• Familiarity with video safety and responsible gen-AI practices (content filtering, watermarking, provenance, bias, prompt abuse mitigation).
• Experience building human + automated evaluation loops for generative video quality and preference optimization (reward models, RLHF-style tuning, DPO variants, or preference learning).
• Understanding of inference optimization (quantization, compilation, batching, KV cache strategies, streaming generation, GPU memory optimization).

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver research projects that advance Canva’s generative video capabilities (text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-video, video editing).
• Design and run rigorous experiments to validate hypotheses, improve quality, controllability, temporal coherence, and runtime performance.
• Develop and improve model architectures and training pipelines for video generation, including diffusion-based approaches and complementary techniques.
• Translate research into production impact by partnering with ML engineers to scale training/inference and integrate models into Canva’s product ecosystem.
• Advance evaluation and benchmarking for generative video, including perceptual quality, motion fidelity, temporal consistency, identity preservation, prompt adherence, safety, and robustness.
• Explore data strategies for video (curation, filtering, deduplication, captioning/annotation, synthetic data, bootstrapped labeling) that improve model reliability and controllability.
• Contribute to the research roadmap by tracking emerging trends, proposing new directions, and identifying high-leverage problems in generative video.
• Share knowledge through internal write-ups, talks, cross-team reviews, and (where appropriate) external publications or conference engagement.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees