Applied Research Scientist

Job Title: Applied Research Scientist

Location: Beijing, China (Hybrid)

Company: Canva

Job Type: Full-time

Experience Level: Open to experienced professionals, 2025 & 2026 graduates, and interns

Role Summary:

Canva is seeking an Applied Research Scientist to advance the real-world impact of cutting-edge generative AI. You'll focus on building and applying the latest multimodal AI models for user-centric applications, enabling smarter design tools for hundreds of millions of users.

Key Responsibilities:

• Conduct applied research to convert generative model advancements into production-ready applications.
• Define new, practical AI tasks aligned with real user needs (e.g., CUA agents, DeepResearch).
• Lead post-training efforts (e.g., SFT, fine-tuning) to enhance model performance and visual output.
• Collaborate with ML Engineers on inference optimization and product integration.
• Monitor and validate emerging research from academia and industry.

Qualifications:

• Strong experience with generative AI models (e.g., FLUX, Qwen3-Coder, Qwen2.5-VL, DeepSeek-R1).
• Proven track record in deploying LLMs and diffusion models with optimization techniques (distillation, quantization, speculative decoding).
• Solid programming skills in Python and PyTorch.
• Experience with cloud-based model deployment and scaling.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to share knowledge across teams.
• Academic or open-source contributions are a plus.