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Canva

LLM Agent Research Scientist

5 day weekBuilt In Best Places '26Hybrid · Beijing, China

Company Description

At Canva, we're building a future powered by AI that's as magical as it is impactful. As an LLM Agent Research Scientist 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.

About the Group/Team

We're the CORE team within the Generative AI supergroup. Our mission is to invent foundational technologies that will power the future of AI-assisted design. From large-scale models to groundbreaking research, our team builds the technical core of Canva's creative intelligence engine. We collaborate globally to ship research that makes a real impact—from smart editing to AI video tools—at massive scale.

Job Description

About the Role

As an LLM Agent Research Scientist, you'll define and lead research that pushes the limits of what LLM-powered agents can do. You'll design agent architectures, reasoning and planning methods, tool-use and multi-agent frameworks, and the post-training recipes (including RL) that make agents capable and dependable. You'll also train models with high-end GPUs on large, high-quality datasets. You'll sit at the intersection of frontier research and product, directly shaping how LLM agents transform the way people create and get work done in Canva.

At the moment, this role is focused on

  • Research Direction: Determining and leading agent research initiatives aligned with the frontier of LLM/agent research and Canva's product goals.

  • Model Innovation: Creating novel agent capabilities through post-training and RL—developing reward modeling, synthetic data, and environment design—and running experiments with high-end GPUs on large, high-quality datasets to validate hypotheses and translate results into shippable improvements.

  • Harness Innovation: Designing and building the agent harness that lets agents execute complex, long-horizon tasks reliably in production, and exploring harness techniques for self-improvement.

  • Evaluation: Creating rigorous benchmarks and evaluation methods for agent correctness, safety, robustness, and real-world task success.

  • Product Impact: Partnering closely with engineering, product, design, and data teams to land frontier research capabilities in real Canva product experiences.

Qualifications

You're probably a match if you have:

  • Rich, hands-on experience developing and iterating on LLM-based agents or foundation models—covering areas such as post-training, RL, reward modeling, synthetic data, or agent environment design.

  • A strong academic and professional track record, including peer-reviewed publications at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR/ACL/EMNLP/CVPR and/or impactful open-source contributions.

  • Proficiency in Python and PyTorch, with familiarity in frameworks and libraries such as Transformers, DeepSpeed, Megatron, and agent/RL frameworks, as well as cloud computing platforms for efficient training and deployment.

  • Curiosity! Always looking to stay ahead of industry trends by tracking AI literature, competitors, and emerging technologies.

Additional Information

This position is open to candidates at all experience levels, including experienced candidates, graduates, as well as internship opportunities. The role is based in Beijing. We welcome your application and look forward to having you on board!