Staff Research Scientist: Avatar AI & Diffusion (Remote)

Synthesia

Zürich

Hybrid

CHF 180,000 - 280,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work setting

25 days annual leave

Zurich office access

Job summary

Synthesia is seeking a Staff Research Scientist to join the Interactive Avatars team in our R&D department. You will set the research direction for dyadic interaction modeling and advance the perceptual layer for avatar conversations, including understanding user audio and video and generating natural reactions.

You’ll post-train multimodal diffusion models, adapt them to conversational state and listener cues, and build evaluation frameworks.

Qualifications

Must have strong expertise in diffusion models for video/avatar generation.
Proven ability to publish in top venues or equivalent impact.
Experience leading researchers and transitioning ideas to production.

Responsibilities

Set the research direction and roadmap for dyadic interaction modeling.
Advance the perceptual layer of interactive agents, including user audio/video understanding and reactions.
Post‑train multimodal models to generate natural dyadic interactions from audio/video inputs.
Adapt diffusion models to conversational state, turn-taking, and listener cues.
Build robust evaluation frameworks and test suites for interaction quality.
Partner with the data team to define data needs and curate high‑quality datasets.
Lead and mentor a small research team and drive decisions across research, data, and engineering.