Hybrid PhD Research Scientist Intern - Generative AI

Canva; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 173,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

On-site SF campus

Generative AI internship

Job summary

Canva is seeking current PhD students for a 16 week AI Research Internship in San Francisco. You’ll join Canva’s AI team on a live project, turning your PhD work into real-world impact.

The role blends production data, tooling, and deadlines with learning from researchers and engineers shaping Canva’s AI experiences. You’ll develop synthetic data pipelines for design agents, collaborate across teams, and contribute insights to advance agentic AI across Canva’s product suite.

Qualifications

• Currently completing a PhD (ideally third year or later).
• Experience with human‑AI interaction, conversational agents, or user‑modeling research.
• Ability to design, run, and interpret machine‑learning experiments with scientific rigor.
• Ability to develop research code for data processing, model training, and evaluation.
• Clear written and verbal communication of technical work.
• Enjoy collaborating with researchers and engineers on challenging problems.

Responsibilities

• Develop a synthetic data pipeline that produces conversations with a design agent conditioned on personas.
• Combine persona-conditioned user-simulation with existing pipelines to keep output realistic.
• Measure realism, distributional fit, and evaluation quality with reproducible validation.
• Collaborate with eval/labelling, research, and product teams on synthetic data use in evaluation.
• Contribute findings back to the research community through publications when appropriate.

Skills

Human-AI interaction

Conversational agents

User modeling

ML experiments

Research code

Data processing

Model training

Technical communication

Cross-team collaboration

Education

PhD candidate

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Job description

Canva is seeking current PhD students for a 16 week AI Research Internship in San Francisco. You’ll join Canva’s AI team on a live project, turning your PhD work into real-world impact.

The role blends production data, tooling, and deadlines with learning from researchers and engineers shaping Canva’s AI experiences. You’ll develop synthetic data pipelines for design agents, collaborate across teams, and contribute insights to advance agentic AI across Canva’s product suite.