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San Francisco, CA

Internship

Hybrid

Intern

Canva is a company redefining how the world experiences design, and they are seeking a PhD Research Scientist Intern to help shape the culture of AI at Canva. The intern will work with the AI team on a live project, gaining hands-on experience and contributing to the development of synthetic data pipelines and user-simulation techniques.

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Responsibilities

Developing a synthetic data pipeline that produces conversations with our design agent — user turns, tool calls, and design-state changes — conditioned on personas and statistical criteria on requests derived from real usage
Combining persona-conditioned user-simulation techniques (e.g. evolved/adversarial personas, dual-control agent frameworks) with our existing intent-labeling and clustering pipeline, to keep synthetic output in-distribution with real usage
Measuring realism gap, distributional fit, and downstream evaluation quality (separability and agreement against our existing ELO rankings) with rigorous, reproducible validation
Collaborating with the eval/labelling, research, and product teams to determine whether and how synthetic data can substitute for real user-generated content in evaluation
Contributing methodology and findings back to the broader research community through publication where results support it — this is an active, largely unsolved area of research

Qualification

Required

You're currently completing a PhD (ideally third year or later)
You have experience with human-AI interaction, conversational agents, or user-modeling research
You can design, run, and interpret machine-learning experiments with strong scientific rigour
You can develop research code for data processing, model training, and evaluation
You communicate technical work clearly in writing and presentations
You enjoy collaborating with researchers and engineers on technically challenging problems
You're a clear communicator who can collaborate effectively across teams