Engineering Manager - (ML) - Evaluation Platform

About the Group/Team

Canva's AI Platform Group provides the foundational infrastructure and tooling that powers AI features across the company, supporting MLEs, researchers, and AI builders from CORE and the wider organisation. Within the group, the Evaluation Platform team owns the end-to-end evaluation lifecycle: test-like evals integrated into developer workflows, the Arena comparative evaluation service, monitoring evals sampled from production traffic, and human labelling tooling. The team partners closely with AI feature teams, CORE researchers, and adjacent platform teams (Inference, Datasets, and Training) to make rigorous evaluation the default for every AI feature Canva ships.

About the Role/Specialty

We're seeking an engineering manager who can lead a large, senior team through a period of consolidation and growth. The Evaluation Platform team operates at the intersection of ML research practice and production platform engineering; you'll need enough technical depth in ML and evaluation to hold a credible strategic position, and the people leadership skills to coach a team of 9+ engineers, most of them senior. The role involves significant stakeholder complexity: multiple internal customer teams with competing priorities, adjacent teams with overlapping ambitions in the evaluation space, and a company-wide programme of work that runs through this team. You'll be expected to own and articulate the evaluation platform vision, not just execute a roadmap handed to you.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

Coaching, mentoring, and growing a team that is a mix of specialties and skills while developing your coaching capability to scale the team and meet the needs of Canva's AI platform vision. You'll do this by:

• Owning and evolving the evaluation platform strategy: consolidating test-like evals, comparative evaluation (Arena), monitoring evals, and labelling tooling into a coherent, self-serve platform.

• Partnering with AI feature teams and CORE leadership to understand their roadmaps and proactively identify the evaluation capabilities needed for upcoming initiatives.

• Coordinating with adjacent platform teams and the evals programme PM to ensure a seamless experience across the full ML lifecycle.

• Owning and driving the delivery of large, cross-team, and cross-group initiatives from ideation to completion, with autonomy and independence of decision making.

• Coaching a team of 9+ engineers by providing regular, practical feedback and collaboratively helping them reach their personal growth goals.

• Owning the team's development methodology and rituals, such as planning cycles, stand-ups, and retrospectives.

• Planning goals and defining success metrics to ensure alignment between the company, group, and team.

• Championing a culture of knowledge sharing and advocating effectively for evaluation and ML engineering needs to stakeholders across Canva.

• Running hiring and resourcing, including resourcing for the execution of the roadmap.

• What we're looking for

• A history of success in technical people leadership and mentorship of engineers, ideally including senior and staff-level ICs.

• Experience with ML evaluation, LLM systems, or ML platform engineering; you understand what makes evaluating generative AI hard and can engage credibly with both researchers and engineers.

• Experience designing and building complex, distributed systems, ideally involving machine learning.

• Strong stakeholder management skills: comfortable navigating competing priorities across multiple customer teams and negotiating scope boundaries with adjacent teams.

• First principles thinking; the ability to use deep understanding of a problem space to make informed decisions, even when those decisions differ from industry convention. Canva is a unique company solving unique problems, and this sometimes requires bold decisions.

• A balance of strong technical and people leadership skills.

• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to break large projects into smaller ones and deliver on them through others.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Proven expertise in inspiring others to achieve their full potential and enabling the engineers in your team to do novel, impactful work.

• A continuous learner attitude, energised by a problem space (GenAI evaluation) that is evolving month to month.

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

• 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

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, as well as how you can enhance Canva and our culture. When you apply, please tell us the pronouns you use and any reasonable adjustments you may need during the interview process.

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!

Please note that interviews are conducted virtually.