AI Program Manager (Localisation) - 12 Month Contract

Location: Sydney, au

Job Description

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design.

Hello, 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. We also have a campus in Melbourne and co-working spaces in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. But you have choice in where and how you work, we trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals.

About the Team

Canva’s International Supergroup is responsible for driving growth and deepening adoption across our key regions worldwide. We are an entrepreneurial, cross-functional team that turns bold strategy into culturally resonant execution.

In each country, our mission is to empower all users to design and to make Canva one of the most beloved and culturally iconic brands in the country.

About the Role

This is a program manager role at its heart, and a chance to own a problem that really matters: making Canva feel like it was built for you, whatever language you think in. You'll be the person who brings together every team working on Canva's GenAI localisation goal - product, research, country teams, evaluation specialists and external partners - and turns a sprawling, ambiguous challenge into a clear plan everyone can get behind.

About 70-80% of your time is program leadership and operations: setting the direction, rallying people, and building the systems that let us measure and improve localisation quality at scale. The other 20-30% is hands-on enough that you can spot patterns in the data and speak credibly with the technical teams. You don't need to be a localisation expert or have trained models yourself - you need to be brilliant at bringing order to complexity and getting cross-functional teams moving in the same direction.

This is a 12 month fixed term contract. 

What you’ll do

• Lead the program to make Canva's GenAI localisation goal real - holding the plan, the timeline and the people together

• Support with desiging evaluation operations at scale, including human review pipelines in Label Studio across many languages and building the foundations for automated evals

• Manage the contingent labeller workforce and external vendors who power evaluation, including capacity planning and quality standards

• Partner with the GenAI evaluation teams to define what "good" looks like for localisation quality

• Build lightweight dashboards and tooling to track quality and surface issues - comfortable vibe-coding your way to a working view

• Spot patterns in localisation quality data and translate them into recommendations the technical teams can act on

• Communicate progress, risks and decisions clearly to stakeholders from labellers all the way up to leadership

What we're looking for

• You're a program or operations leader who thrives in ambiguity and loves bringing order to chaos

• You've run complex cross-functional programs where success depended on rallying people you don't manage

• You're comfortable enough with data and AI concepts - things like LLM evaluation, RAG, BLEU or COMET - to hold your own with technical teams, even if you've never trained a model

• You can manage a workforce of reviewers and vendors without losing sight of quality

• You can move fluidly between a labeller's day-to-day and a leadership update without missing a beat

• You've delivered AI or transformation programs from 0-to-1 at enterprise scale - turning a blank page into a shipped, repeatable system

• Backgrounds that tend to fit: program management, AI program or transformation roles, principal program management, or product operations

• Speaking multiple languages is a huge bonus

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.