Canva · 4 hours ago
Senior Research Scientist - Generative Video
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$230K/yr - $280K/yrCanva is a company redefining how the world experiences design. They are seeking a Senior Research Scientist specializing in Generative Video to advance their capabilities in video generation and editing through hands-on applied research and collaboration with engineering and product teams.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Graphic DesignPhoto EditingPublishingSoftwareWeb Design
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
Qualification
Required
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
Preferred
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)
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
Company
Canva
Canva is an online design and visual communication platform that provides design tools for non-designers.
Founded in 2013
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Canva has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (4)
2023 (1)
2022 (3)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$2.51BKey Investors
FidelityQuadrant Private EquityStack Capital
2025-08-20Secondary Market
2024-10-31Secondary Market
2024-05-02Secondary Market· $328.51M
Leadership Team
Melanie Perkins
CEO & Co-founder
Cameron Adams
CPO & Co-Founder
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