# Principal Research Scientist - Evaluations at Canva

- Company: Canva
- What the company does: Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora,你好, hallo, vítejte! Thanks for stopping by. Backed by Bessemer, General Catalyst and 500 Global.
- Company website: https://www.canva.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: San Francisco, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $310K to $420K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-26
- Apply by: 2026-10-10
- Apply: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Canva/6000000001354059
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/canva-principal-research-scientist-evaluations/

## About the role

Canva's generative models are judged by millions of people who will never read a benchmark. They just know whether the design looks right. Turning that judgement into something measurable is the hardest problem in our research stack, and it gates everything else. If we cannot measure design quality reliably, we cannot train against it, we cannot tell a real improvement from noise, and we cannot decide what ships.

## What they're looking for

- Experience linking evaluation metrics to downstream business or user outcomes, and diagnosing why they diverge
- Experience turning subjective human judgement into reliable, objective evaluation signal through rubric design, human data pipelines and model training
- Strong grounding in multimodal generative models (diffusion, transformers, VLMs and MLLMs) and their architectures, deep enough to know where evaluation will break
- Experience with reward modelling, preference learning, or alignment methods involving human feedback
- Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams or a wide specialty area in a globally distributed organisation, with the instinct to find the gap nobody owns and close it without waiting for a mandate