PhD Research Scientist Intern

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

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

We’re looking for current PhD students ready to bring their research into the real world and help shape the culture of AI at Canva.

Our full-time, 16 week AI Research Internship starts in September. During your internship, you’ll work directly with Canva’s AI team on a live, industry-scale project, turning part of your PhD journey into real world impact.

You’ll gain hands on experience with real data, production infrastructure and real deadlines, while learning from and working alongside the researchers and engineerings creating Canva’s next generation of AI‑powered experiences.

Where and how you can work

Our global HQ is in Sydney, Australia, and as we continue to grow in our largest global market, we’ve made our way from down under to San Francisco.

Our Jackson Square campus blends the neighbourhoods vibrant downtown charm with Canva’s signature flair. The space is designed for both deep work and collaboration, along with spaces for Canvanauts to relax, recharge and connect.

This role is based in San Francisco, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you flexibility - you’ll have the option to work from home as well as connecting and collaborating with your team in‑person, on campus. We trust teams to choose the balance that empowers them to achieve their goals.

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on:

• Developing a synthetic data pipeline that produces conversations with our design agent — user turns, tool calls, and design‑state changes — conditioned on personas and statistical criteria on requests derived from real usage.
• Combining persona‑conditioned user‑simulation techniques (e.g. evolved/adversarial personas, dual‑control agent frameworks) with our existing intent‑labeling and clustering pipeline, to keep synthetic output in‑distribution with real usage.
• Measuring realism gap, distributional fit, and downstream evaluation quality (separability and agreement against our existing ELO rankings) with rigorous, reproducible validation.
• Collaborating with the eval/labelling, research, and product teams to determine whether and how synthetic data can substitute for real user‑generated content in evaluation.
• Contributing methodology and findings back to the broader research community through publication where results support it — this is an active, largely unsolved area of research.

You’re probably a match if you have:

• You’re currently completing a PhD (ideally third year or later).
• You have experience with human‑AI interaction, conversational agents, or user‑modeling research.
• You can design, run, and interpret machine‑learning experiments with strong scientific rigour.
• You can develop research code for data processing, model training, and evaluation.
• You communicate technical work clearly in writing and presentations.
• You enjoy collaborating with researchers and engineers on technically challenging problems.
• You’re a clear communicator who can collaborate effectively across teams.

At Canva, we’re building a future powered by AI that’s as magical as it is impactful. As a Generative AI Research Scientist Intern at Canva, you’ll advance the frontier of agentic AI—building autonomous systems that can reason, plan, use tools, and act on behalf of hundreds of millions of users. You’ll explore the boundaries of what agents can achieve in real‑world productivity and creative scenarios, and bring that research into Canva's core product experiences—across design, presentations, documents, spreadsheets, video, and other multimodal creation and collaboration workflows.

Other stuff to know

At Canva, we value fairness, and we strive to provide competitive, market‑informed compensation whilst ensuring internal equity within the team in each region. The salary for this position is fixed at $157,000. When calculating offers, we make salary decisions based on market data, your experience levels, and internal benchmarks of your peers in the same domain and job level.

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.