Engineering Manager - (ML) - Evaluation Platform

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Hey, g'day! Thanks for stopping by. We know job hunting can be a little time-consuming, and you're probably keen to find out what's on offer, so we'll get straight to the point. Where and how you can work Our offices are a hub for collaboration and energy. But we also believe in working where you do your best thinking. Canva offers flexibility to work in a way that suits you, whether that's remote, hybrid, or in-office. This role is based in Sydney, close to the majority of the Engineering team.

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.

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