PhD Research Scientist Intern - Reinforcement Learning, Images

📋 Description Internship with Canva's AI team on a live, industry-scale project 16 weeks, starts in September Hands-on with real data, production infra, and deadlines Collaborate with researchers, engineers, and product teams toward production Begin on novel parts from week one due to established groundwork 🎯 Requirements PhD student, ideally third year or later Strong diffusion or flow-matching background Hands-on policy-gradient RL for generative models (GRPO, PPO, DPO or similar) Experience fine-tuning VLMs (e.g., LoRA) and prompts/rubrics for evaluation Reward modelling, preference optimisation, pseudo-labelling, distillation Ability to read and reproduce recent papers; clear communication in writing/presentations 🎁 Benefits London-based hybrid role with option to work from home Work on impactful AI projects used by millions Mentorship from four mentors and cross-team collaboration Opportunity to publish results and contribute to Canva's research roadmap