Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Global Payments (ANZ remote)

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 campus is in Sydney, with a second campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland, NZ. You have flexibility in how and where you work — whether that's from one of our spaces, from home, or a mix of both. This role is remote-friendly within Australia or New Zealand, so you can choose the setup that empowers you and your team to do your best work.

About the Team

The Revenue Platform group is building Canva’s global monetization engine: a payments platform that processes billions in volume across 190+ countries. The Global Payments team owns the systems that ensure anyone, anywhere can pay for Canva—reliably, securely, and with high conversion.

About the Role

This role is for a senior ML engineer who will build decisioning and optimisation models that sit at the heart of Canva’s payments orchestration layer.

You will be the first machine learning engineer embedded in Global Payments and have the opportunity to define the ML strategy, foundations, and operating model for payments optimisation within the team.

This role is highly cross-functional: you’ll work with payments engineering, data, fraud, and product to ship ML that measurably improves revenue outcomes and customer experience.

What we're looking for

Technical skills

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping ML systems end-to-end (feature design → training → evaluation → deployment → monitoring).

• Domain knowledge of supervised learning and decisioning systems; experience with exploration/exploitation approaches (bandits) is a plus.

• Ability to work with large-scale, noisy transactional data and produce reliable models.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, code quality, APIs, and operational ownership.

• Python proficiency; experience with common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch / TensorFlow / scikit-learn).

Product and platform mindsets

• Strong judgment on trade-offs and risk: understands how ML can fail and how to design safe rollouts.

• Comfortable working in ambiguous problem spaces and turning them into clear, measurable deliverables.

• Ability to communicate clearly with stakeholders across engineering, product, finance, and risk.

Domain experience (nice to have)

• Payments, fraud/risk, credit card authorisation, retries/dunning, routing, or experimentation in high-stakes systems.

• Familiarity with compliance constraints (PCI scope minimisation, auditability, access controls) in financial systems.

Don't tick all the boxes? Don't worry about that - nobody does!  

We’d still love to hear from you! At Canva, we know that great engineers come from a variety of backgrounds, and we value passion, curiosity, and a willingness to learn just as much as specific experience. If you're excited about this role but don’t tick every box, we encourage you to apply, you might a great fit in ways you didn’t expect!

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.