Senior Research Engineer - Video Agents

black.ai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Health benefits

401(k) retirement plan

Inclusive parental leave

Vibe & Thrive allowance

Flexible leave options

Job summary

black.ai is seeking a Senior Research Engineer in San Francisco to develop next-gen generative video and audio technology. This role significantly impacts AI-driven storytelling, allowing users to create videos with cutting-edge tools.

Responsibilities include designing context for multi-turn sessions, building evaluation metrics, and closely collaborating with product and design teams. The ideal candidate should have 5+ years of experience in ML research or engineering and a strong background in Python and PyTorch.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of ML research or research engineering experience.
• Hands-on agent-building experience in at least one of planning loops, memory management, or agent evals.
• Comfortable in modern agent frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Design the planning layer of the video agent.
• Build and evaluate tool-use behaviours.
• Drive the evals flywheel.

Skills

ML research experience

Strong Python

Experience with PyTorch

Agent-building experience

Multimodal models

Experimental instincts

Job description

Job Description

About the role

In your role as Senior Research Engineer, you'll be at the heart of building the next generation of generative video and audio technology. Your work will push the boundaries of what's possible in AI-driven storytelling, helping Canva users go from idea to finished video with tools that feel genuinely magical. By developing and shipping cutting-edge video generation models, you'll help redefine how hundreds of millions of people create and tell stories visually, shaping one of the most exciting product frontiers in AI.

About the team

Our Video Storytelling team builds the agentic systems behind Canva's video product. We sit between our generative research teams and the millions of creators who use Canva to tell stories every day. Our job is to make video creation feel more like directing and less like editing.

We're hiring a Research Engineer to help define how Canva's video agents think, plan, and ship.

You’ll work hands‑on across the agent stack, from planning and tool orchestration to memory, evals, and shipping. You’ll partner closely with product, design, and our generative‑models teams to turn research into reliable creator experiences.

What you’ll do

• Design the planning layer of our video agent: how it breaks a creative brief into a sequence of generation, editing, and asset decisions.
• Build and evaluate tool‑use behaviours: how the agent chooses among video models, editing primitives, retrieval over a creator’s assets, and external services, and how we measure when it chose well.
• Own context and memory for multi‑turn video sessions, including long‑running projects, brand context, and creator preferences.
• Drive the evals flywheel. Build offline and online evaluations that capture narrative quality and intent satisfaction, not just model metrics.
• Ship to production with the product team. Move research prototypes into Canva features at a pace that keeps up with the model frontier.
• Push the multimodal frontier for storytelling across script, image, video, audio, and timeline structure.

What you bring

• 5+ years of ML research or research engineering experience, with a track record of shipping LLM‑powered systems to production.
• Hands‑on agent‑building experience in at least one of: tool‑use architectures, planning loops, memory and context management, or agent evals.
• Strong Python and PyTorch. Comfortable in modern agent frameworks.
• Experience with multimodal models, and a clear view of where they break inside larger systems.
• Strong experimental instincts: tight baselines, clean ablations, data‑backed conclusions.

Nice to have

• Prior work on creative tools, video editing, or design tooling. Bonus if you’re a regular user of creative tools yourself.
• Familiarity with diffusion and video generation models, as inputs to an agent rather than as a trainer.
• Experience designing evals for LLM‑powered products: LLM‑as‑judge, rubric‑based eval, online quality metrics.
• Open‑source or published work in agent systems, multimodal reasoning, or video understanding.

Additional Information

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard – and we do – but you’ll experience lots of moments of magic, connectivity and fun woven throughout life at Canva, too. We also offer a range of benefits to set you up for every success in and outside of work.

Here’s a taste of what’s on offer:

• 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 support you personally

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more information.

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills, merit and business needs, in compliance with applicable local laws. We celebrate all types of skills and backgrounds at Canva so even if you don’t feel like your skills quite match what’s listed above – we still want to hear from you!

When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process. Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.

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 target base salary range for this position is $220,000 – $280,000. 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.