Principal Research Scientist - Evaluations

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte! Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time consuming and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. Where and how you can work Our head office is in Sydney, Australia, but San Francisco is now home to our US operations. The role is listed as hybrid, meaning we are incredibly flexible and empower you to work where you prefer - whether that's at home or at the office. About the role Canva's generative models are judged by millions of people who will never read a benchmark. They just know whether the design looks right. Turning that judgement into something measurable is the hardest problem in our research stack, and it gates everything else. If we cannot measure design quality reliably, we cannot train against it, we cannot tell a real improvement from noise, and we cannot decide what ships. We are looking for a Principal Research Scientist who defines what evaluation needs to become as the space gets harder, rather than running the playbook we already have. You will own how Canva evaluates generative quality across the whole of Canva Research, including problems we have not framed yet: new modalities, evaluation that reflects real differences between content types, user segments and markets, and a much tighter link between what our metrics say and what users and the business actually experience. This is a Canva-wide craft leadership role, setting direction across our research groups in Australia, Europe, the US and China. You will be the person others come to when the numbers and the eyes disagree. What you'll own The evaluation strategy for Canva Research . Define what great evaluation looks like across design, image, video, audio and agentic workflows, and set the long-term direction for how Canva measures generative quality as the space evolves. You will shape the principles teams use to trade