About The Team
Canva's Data Science organization has reached an inflection point. With 180 data scientists embedded across the business, we've built a substantial and highly capable DS team that drives meaningful impact across every aspect of our business. The team is highly technical and has great commercial acumen. They run many experiments, report on business success, forecast future impacts, and build propensity models that have direct impacts in the product. Now, as AI fundamentally reshapes our industry, we need a transformational leader to evolve our DS organization, elevating the craft, driving AI-first innovation, and ensuring our data capabilities scale with Canva's continued growth.
About The Role
As Global Head of Data Science, you will lead the strategic evolution of our data science organization through a critical transformation. You'll work closely with senior, including C-suite, leaders across the business to redefine how data science operates - shifting from reactive support to proactive strategic partnership, elevating the craft for the AI era, and building the systems and culture needed to scale data excellence across Canva's continued growth.
What You'll Do
- Strategic Leadership & Vision - Drive the strategic evolution of data science at Canva, defining how data capabilities will fuel commercial success and providing critical input into company-wide strategic direction. Connect metrics across the business to ensure deep understanding of what drives impact and progress toward our goals.
- AI-First Transformation - Lead Canva's Data AI strategy and implementation, integrating AI capabilities across all data science functions and positioning data scientists as strategic partners in product development.
- Organizational Excellence & Culture - Partner with leaders across Canva to evolve and shape the data science organization to meet business needs. Work closely with our C-suite & Head of Growth to drive commercial impact and continue our tremendous growth story. Evolve and scale Canva's culture of data excellence while extending our experimentation culture to ensure we can launch great new products with confidence.
- Platform & Technical Leadership - Set the team up for success with great tools that make data work efficient, scalable and enjoyable. Work closely with Product Insights and Data Platform groups to improve our data capabilities. Ensure we're meeting our customers' expectations around privacy, data security and online safety.
What we're looking for
Leadership
- You have led large-scale data science organizations (100+ people) in high-growth tech companies, with experience managing complex, matrixed team structures.
- You have developed leaders at multiple levels, from first-time managers to senior leaders running their own organizations, building deep leadership bench strength.
- You excel at providing teams with the right balance of strategic challenge and operational support to enable peak performance across diverse skill sets and business contexts.
- You can build and maintain strong leadership teams that can operate effectively across different business units and functional areas in an embedded model.
Strategy
- You have proven experience leading large-scale organizational transformation in data science, with a track record of evolving teams from reactive support models to proactive strategic partnerships.
- You excel at cross-functional leadership at the executive level, partnering effectively with C-suite leaders, founders, and senior stakeholders across all business functions.
- You can navigate complex stakeholder dynamics and competing priorities while maintaining focus on strategic outcomes that drive business success.
- You are a great communicator who can translate complex data science concepts into clear business value propositions and influence company-wide strategic decisions.
- You have demonstrated experience building and scaling high-performing data science organizations that directly contribute to commercial growth.
- You bring expertise in AI transformation, with experience defining how AI capabilities drive business outcomes and leading cross-functional AI adoption initiatives with clear success frameworks.
Tech Craft
- You bring deep technical credibility with strong foundations in data science methodologies, statistical thinking, and modern data infrastructure architecture.
- You understand what world-class data science looks like and can guide technical strategy for experimentation platforms, ML, and analytics tooling at scale.
- You have experience leading technical transformation initiatives, establishing data science standards and best practices that balance statistical rigor with business relevance.
- You can evaluate and architect solutions for complex data challenges, understanding the technical tradeoffs involved in building scalable data science capabilities.
- You bring hands-on experience with machine learning and AI systems, with the technical depth to guide teams through model development, deployment, and governance frameworks.
- You understand the technical needs of both data specialists and business users, and can advocate for platform investments that enable self-service while maintaining quality standards.