Senior Backend Engineer - Research Enablement at Canva

About the Team The Research Enablement EU team sits within Canva's AI research group. The team's role is to bridge the gap between research science and product. We take the models and experiments coming out of the research teams and make them production-ready. In practice, that means owning model deployment and rollout pipelines, building and maintaining the infrastructure and tooling that lets researchers iterate faster, and running the data collection systems that feed ML training. The team works closely with AI Platform and the broader research leads to keep Canva's generative AI capabilities moving from lab to product reliably and at scale. About the Role As a backend engineer you’ll be part of the team bridging the gap between research and production. Partnering closely with researchers, and stakeholders across our Gen AI group, you’ll ensure experimental code is production ready, build internal apps and services, and create the tooling and processes that let multiple model variants ship safely and quickly. Your work shortens the research-to-user loop, reduces duplication, and ensures our ML features are reliable, observable, and easy for other teams to adopt. What you’ll do  You will have the opportunity to work on some of the most cutting edge AI features at Canva and collaborate with teams across the group to bring the features to production effectively and make sure they perform reliably at scale. Additionally, you will participate in planning, development and maintenance of building blocks such as training data pipelines and internal tools like data visualisers and aggregators to support our researchers in their end-to-end workflows. This happens in close collaboration with our stakeholders, including data scientists, MLEs, PMs and designers. • 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 You're likely a match if you have • 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 have • Experience in Machine Learning is a huge plus • SQL experience • DynamoDB experience is a plus