Senior Research Data Engineer

About the role

Canva is building AI that feels magical and impacts millions of users. We are looking for a Senior Research Data Engineer to own the data foundations that power our multimodal agent research, turning ambitious ideas into trainable reality.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build data pipelines for agent training, including collection, filtering, deduplication, formatting and versioning across text, image and multimodal sources.
• 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 evolve.
• Create evaluation datasets and benchmarks, curate task distributions and 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.

Required profile

• Strong software engineering experience in Python building production‑grade data pipelines and ML DevOps.
• Hands‑on experience with large‑scale data processing frameworks (e.g., Ray) and cloud storage (AWS, S3).
• Familiarity with annotation tools and human‑in‑the‑loop data collection (Label Studio or similar).

Required skills

• Python
• AWS (S3, cloud infrastructure)
• Ray or comparable distributed processing framework
• Data versioning and large‑scale dataset handling (tokenization, batching, sharding)
• Prompt engineering for LLM/VLM outputs
• Annotation tooling (Label Studio)