Canva · 8 hours ago
Staff Research Engineer - Generative Video
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$270K/yr - $310K/yrCanva is a company redefining how the world experiences design. In the role of Staff Research Engineer (Generative Video), you will help develop AI-powered video creation systems, collaborating with Research Scientists and product engineering teams to implement generative video technologies for a large user base.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Graphic DesignPhoto EditingPublishingSoftwareWeb Design
Responsibilities
Working closely with Research Scientists to translate new generative video ideas into practical, scalable implementations (e.g. diffusion-based video generation, multimodal conditioning, temporal consistency techniques)
Setting technical direction for generative video projects (text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-video, and video editing), aligning research bets with product needs, safety expectations, and platform constraints
Designing and building end-to-end training and inference pipelines, evolving prototypes into robust systems with benchmarking, monitoring, regression testing, and production guardrails
Driving quality and controllability improvements through rigorous experimentation — including temporal coherence, identity preservation, prompt adherence, and runtime performance
Engineering core model + systems components for modern generative video approaches
Optimizing for scale and efficiency, including distributed training performance, mixed precision, memory/throughput improvements, batching, and system-level latency/cost trade-offs in serving
Advancing evaluation, benchmarking, and data strategy, improving reliability via dataset curation, filtering, deduplication, captioning/annotation, synthetic data, and bootstrapped labeling
Strengthening operational excellence for production models: observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, rollbacks, prevention via automated checks and guardrails
Mentoring and uplifting others through design reviews, code reviews, experiment reviews, and knowledge-sharing across engineering and research
Qualification
Required
Strong experience building generative AI systems, ideally in generative video or video editing (multimodal experience is a big plus)
Solid understanding of modern generative approaches (diffusion models, Transformers/DiTs, GANs) and how they behave in real-world pipelines
Strong working knowledge of multimodal learning, including video-text/video-image conditioning, VLM-style conditioning, and/or retrieval-augmented conditioning
Staff-level engineering impact, with a track record of leading technical initiatives across stakeholders — driving alignment, making trade-offs, and delivering durable outcomes
Experience scaling training and inference, including distributed training across large GPU fleets and a clear understanding of throughput/cost/infra trade-offs
Excellent engineering fundamentals: clean maintainable code, testing discipline, CI/CD workflows, performance benchmarking, and robust production observability
Scientific rigor and execution strength, with the ability to design strong experiments, validate hypotheses, and improve model behavior using measurable evaluation frameworks
Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML stacks, and the ability to take research ideas/papers and implement them robustly
Preferred
Experience with video editing models (inpainting/outpainting, temporal masking, object removal, background replacement, stylization, relighting)
Experience with responsible gen-AI practices for video (safety filtering, watermarking/provenance, abuse mitigation, robustness)
Experience with human + automated evaluation loops (preference optimization, reward models, RLHF/DPO-style methods)
Deep inference optimization experience (quantization, compilation, 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
Recent News
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