Data Scientist - Personalisation

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hey, g'day, mabuhay, kia ora, 你好, hallo, vítejte!

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 flagship Sydney campus is uniquely Canva - an extension of our Surry Hills neighbourhood. It’s a thoughtfully designed space with plenty of room to collaborate, focus, and connect.

This role is based in Sydney, and we’re looking for someone who calls it home. Our hybrid way of working gives you the flexibility to work remotely, and to come together on campus for meaningful in-person collaboration and connection when it matters most. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

What you’d be doing in this role

As Canva scales, change continues to be part of our DNA. But we like to think that's all part of the fun. So this will give you the flavour of the type of things you'll be working on when you start, but this will likely evolve.

At the moment, this role is focused on

• Design and analyse A/B and multivariate experiments to measure the impact of personalisation features, ensuring statistical rigour and clear interpretation of results

• Build and maintain dashboards that give product and engineering partners clear visibility into how personalisation programs are performing, and keep them updated as the product evolves

• Conduct exploratory data analysis to uncover user behaviour patterns and surface actionable insights for product and design partners

• Partner with ML engineers to take models from prototype to production, contributing to feature engineering, evaluation frameworks, and monitoring

• Work with analytics engineers to identify the data you need and make sure it's modelled correctly for your use cases

• Translate complex analytical findings into clear, concise recommendations that non-technical stakeholders can act on

• Keep up with relevant literature and emerging techniques, bringing new approaches to the team where they genuinely add value

• Maintain data quality across your domain - monitoring key metrics, investigating incidents, validating pipeline outputs, and keeping documentation up to date

You're probably a match if

• You have a solid grounding in applied statistics - you're comfortable with experimental design, regression, classification, and the tradeoffs involved in model selection.

• You understand the difference between correlation and causation and you care about getting that distinction right.

• You write clean, well-structured Python (and/or R) and you're confident working with large datasets using SQL. Experience with Snowflake is a strong plus.

• You are comfortable using AI tools in your workflows.

• You're someone who communicates clearly: you can explain what your model does, what its limitations are, and what a stakeholder should actually do with the result.

• You’re comfortable gathering requirements from product, engineering, and business stakeholders and translating ambiguous questions into well-scoped data science work.

• You're curious and self-motivated - you don't wait to be handed a question, you go looking for the insight.

• You're also comfortable working in a collaborative, feedback-rich environment, and you see code reviews and analytical critiques as tools for getting better, not obstacles to shipping.

About the team

Personalisation sits across Canva's Growth and Discovery Supergroups and our goal is to make Canva feel like it was built just for you. We partner closely with product, data science, and engineering to translate user signals into smarter, more relevant onsite experiences. Our work directly influences how millions of people first encounter Canva and how they continue to find value over time.

As a Data Scientist in Personalisation, you'll work on the models and analyses that help us understand our users and serve them better. You'll collaborate closely with product managers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers to design experiments, build predictive models, and translate data into clear recommendations. A core part of this role is supporting our personalisation and messaging programs by owning the experimentation reporting, impact analysis, and data insights that guide how we improve these initiatives over time. This is a role for someone who’s building their craft, you’ll have strong foundations in statistics and reporting, and you’ll be working in an environment that takes data science seriously and invests in helping you grow. Your work will directly shape which personalisation ideas we pursue, how we measure them, and what we ship to users.

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 stack 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.