Staff Data Scientist - Discovery

Job Description:

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.
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Where and how you can work

Our flagship campus is in Sydney, with spaces across Australia. You have the flexibility to choose how and where you work best.

What you'd be doing in this role

This role sits within the Content & Discovery Supergroup, in the Discovery Group, where we’re building a highly personalised Canva - helping users discover over 100M+ templates, photos, videos and elements.

As a Staff Data Scientist, you’ll operate as a senior individual contributor with end-to-end ownership of ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces. You’ll shape product strategy through data, influence decision-making across the group, and elevate the standard of data science across Discovery.

Your primary goal will be to uncover product opportunities that help users succeed in their goals and to influence product strategy across Discovery — both by demonstrating their potential impact and by raising the standard of how data science is done in the group. 

At the moment, this role is focused on

• Data insights: Your main goal in Discovery is to drive cross-group strategic insight — synthesising signals from user behaviour data into a coherent point of view that shapes product direction. You'll set the standard for how the group turns data into decisions, and empower teams across Discovery to make informed choices that delight customers.
• Raising the floor: Uplifting the team's baseline impact by identifying and fixing what slows us down — improving practices, automating low-value and busy work, and building self-serve tooling that makes better use of everyone's time. If there's leverage being left on the table, you'll help the team pick it up.
• Raising the ceiling: Setting direction and advancing the DS craft and influence within Discovery — connecting the dots across specialties and the company to drive customer value, leading by example, and helping others grow. You'll define what great data science looks like in our group and create the conditions for the team to consistently punch above its weight.
• Building Relationships: Engaging with and influencing stakeholders across the group and the company to align on strategy and surface opportunities. Facilitating open dialogue across teams, helping others build the relationships they need to succeed, and modelling the kind of cross-functional collaboration that drives results at scale.
• Experimenting: Designing and leading experiments to test hypotheses formulated from user research and your own strategic insights, analysing the results, and using them to influence next steps. You'll also help raise the group's experimentation standard — sharing knowledge, improving shared practices, and championing rigour across teams.
• Influencing with Metrics: Designing and building goal metrics at a group level, forecasting and setting targets, designing analytics events that track feature usage, and building frameworks and dashboards that others can build on. Then using them to diagnose issues and shape what the business does — at a group and company level.

You're probably a match if

• You have proven record of influencing business and product decisions with data and directly contributing to company growth.

• You thrive in tackling ambiguous and undefined problems by gathering context, exploring data, and paving the way step by step, onboarding the stakeholders along the way.

• You have the soft skills & personal qualities to understand the various stories user behaviour data might tell and to influence decision makers: balancing speed and accuracy, identifying biases in interpreting data, connecting the dots between different research, speaking persuasively in public, and writing concisely and clearly.

• You have a strong base in the fundamental technical skills of data science – hypothesis-driven problem solving, using SQL to wrangle data, numerical thinking, designing & forecasting goal metrics, uncovering strategic insights, and storytelling with data.

• You have experience with other technical data science skills, especially experimenting, designing analytic events, & data warehousing.

• You are an eager learner who is willing to learn new context and new ways to do things. This includes eagerness to go all in on using and building AI tools to increase self and team productivity and impact.

• It would be desirable if you have experience working with search or recommendations-related data sets.

• You may have a grounding in mathematics/statistics and a bachelor's degree in a STEM area.

• You have worked in a tech company that produced a web/mobile-based customer-facing product before and are familiar with the way a tech company operates and some of the concepts particular to our industry (e.g. product funnels, designing analytic events, etc.).

• You have experience with R or Python, and have dealt with large datasets before

About the team

You’ll be joining the Discovery Data team, a core part of the Discovery Group. We build AI and ML-powered systems that personalise how users explore Canva - connecting them to the most relevant content to design faster and better.

We operate at a massive scale, working on some of Canva’s most impactful product surfaces, and play a key role in shaping the future of a deeply personalised design experience.

What's in it for you?

Achieving our crazy big goals motivates us to work hard—but you’ll also experience moments of magic, connection and fun along the way.

Here’s a taste of what’s on offer:
• Equity packages — we want our success to be yours too
• Inclusive parental leave that supports all parents & carers
• Vibe & Thrive allowance for wellbeing, connection and setup
• Flexible leave options to recharge and support what matters to you

Check out lifeatcanva.com for more info.

Other stuff to know

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion, and how you’ll add to Canva and our culture.

We celebrate all backgrounds—if this role excites you but you don’t tick every box, we still want to hear from you.

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