Sr. Research Engineer - Generative Video (Avatars)

Who are we?

From your everyday PowerPoint presentations to Hollywood movies, AI will transform the way we create and consume content.
Today, people want to watch and listen, not read — both at home and at work. If you’re reading this and nodding, check out our brand video.

Despite the clear preference for video, communication and knowledge sharing in the business environment are still dominated by text, largely because high-quality video production remains complex and challenging to scale—until now….

Meet Synthesia

We're on a mission to make video easy for everyone. Born in an AI lab, our AI video communications platform simplifies the entire video production process, making it easy for everyone, regardless of skill level, to create, collaborate, and share high-quality videos. Whether it's for delivering essential training to employees and customers or marketing products and services, Synthesia enables large organizations to communicate and share knowledge through video quickly and efficiently. We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2.

In 2023, we were one of 7 European companies to reach unicorn status. In February 2024, G2 named us as the fastest growing company in the world. We’ve raised over $150M in funding from top-tier investors, including Accel, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Google and top founders and operators including Stripe, Datadog, Miro, Webflow, and Facebook.

About the role

As a Senior Research Engineer you will join a team of 40+ Researchers and Engineers within the R&D Department working on cutting edge challenges in the Generative AI space, with a focus on creating highly realistic, emotional and life-like Synthetic humans through text-to-video. Within the team you’ll have the opportunity to work on the applied side of our research efforts led by our Director of Science, Prof. Vittorio Ferrari, and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you have experience with the full SDLC, from ideation through implementation, to testing and release, and you also have extensive knowledge and experience in the Computer Vision and Generative AI domain with a focus on Diffusion, this is your chance. This is an opportunity to work for a company that is impacting businesses at a rapid pace across the globe.

What will you be doing?

In this position, you'll join the team to help develop our foundational model for video generation based on large video data-sets. You will also help build the academic contributions in this area. In this role you will be conducting cutting edge research, pushing the boundaries and going beyond existing SOTA solutions. This would include:

• Reviewing specialized literature on text to video / video synthesis.
• Working on our Large Video Model project and making sure that it is in line with our vision for our Avatars.
• Training models using large scale image+text data-sets using multi GPU setups.
• Developing production quality software, our teams work “full stack” with the ability to deliver direct to product and impact the world. 
• Taking ownership of the full ML lifecycle from concept, development, testing, validation to deployment.
• Optimizing for deployment - turning prototypes into working solutions.

Who are you?

• You have a background in Computer Vision / Computer Science and 3+ years of industry experience. (PhD preferred)
• You have worked with Generative Models (LLM, LVM)
• You have strong experience in the video space (Diffusion models / GAN’s), preferably in the Avatar or generative video domain
• You are interested in doing research, trying new things and pushing the boundaries, going beyond what's already known.
• You have experience in using most modern frameworks for machine learning and deep learning.
• You have great coding skills in Python and you care about writing beautiful code.
• You have experience with SDLC tools (Git), preferably CI/CD,
• And finally..You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and you are passionate about what you do!

The good stuff...

• Attractive compensation  (salary + stock options + bonus)
• Private Health Insurance in London
• Hybrid work setting with an office in London
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays
• Work in a great company culture with the option to join regular planning and socials at our hubs, and company retreats
• A generous referral scheme when you know people that are amazing for us
• Strong opportunities for your career growth

You can see more about Who we are and How we work here: https://www.synthesia.io/careers