Engineering Manager - (ML) - Evaluation Platform

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.

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.
• What we're looking for
• 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 engineers.
• Experience designing and building complex, distributed systems, ideally involving machine learning.
• Strong stakeholder management skills: comfortable navigating competing priorities across multiple customer teams and negotiating scope boundaries with adjacent teams.
• First principles thinking; the ability to use deep understanding of a problem space to make informed decisions, even when those decisions differ from industry convention. Canva is a unique company solving unique problems, and this sometimes requires bold decisions.
• A balance of strong technical and people leadership skills.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to break large projects into smaller ones and deliver on them through others.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven expertise in inspiring others to achieve their full potential and enabling the engineers in your team to do novel, impactful work.
• A continuous learner attitude, energised by a problem space (GenAI evaluation) that is evolving month to month.