Research Scientist - Interactive Avatars & Video Diffusion

Synthesia; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Synthesia is seeking a Research Scientist to join its R&D team, working on avatar-centric interactive video diffusion models. You will contribute to research directions, build models that listen and respond in real time, and drive breakthroughs toward production.

Join a fast-moving environment where your work ships, with opportunities to publish and mentor, shaping the next generation of synthetic human technology at scale.

Qualifications

• A strong ML background and hands-on experience with diffusion models, ideally for video or avatar generation.
• Publications at top-tier venues (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGGRAPH) in areas such as world models, dyadic interaction, or video diffusion, or equivalent demonstrated impact.
• Experience taking research ideas through to working implementations, and motivation to see them reach production.
• Proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML tooling for large-scale training.
• Clear communication of hypotheses, experiments, and results.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the research direction for dyadic interaction modeling, and own well-scoped research problems end to end.
• Advance the state of the art in the perceptual layer of interactive agents, including understanding user audio and video and generating contextually appropriate reactions.
• Post-train multimodal models to generate rich, natural dyadic interactions from user audio and video inputs.
• Adapt diffusion models to new conditioning signals, such as conversational state, turn-taking, and listener cues.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks and test suites for continuous tracking of interaction quality.
• Partner with our data team to define data needs and shape high-quality datasets.
• Run rigorous experiments, and share findings that inform the team's technical decisions.

Skills

Diffusion models

PyTorch

Research to production

Publications in top venues

Job description

Synthesia is seeking a Research Scientist to join its R&D team, working on avatar-centric interactive video diffusion models. You will contribute to research directions, build models that listen and respond in real time, and drive breakthroughs toward production.

Join a fast-moving environment where your work ships, with opportunities to publish and mentor, shaping the next generation of synthetic human technology at scale.