Senior Research Engineer, Avatar Video Diffusion (Hybrid)

Synthesia; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Attractive compensation

Hybrid work setting

25 days leave + holidays

Company culture

Referral scheme

Career growth opportunities

Job summary

Synthesia is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join our Interactive Avatars Team within the R&D Department. You will work on cutting-edge generative AI challenges centered on avatar-centric video diffusion models and real-world deployment used by tens of thousands of businesses.

You will own end-to-end model development, from data preparation to training and evaluation, collaborating with data engineers and product teams to turn research into production features.

Qualifications

• Strong ML (e.g., diffusion, GANs, VAEs) and computer vision background with relevant industry experience.
• Hands-on experience with diffusion models (ideally avatar-centric or video-focused) and up to date with recent advances.
• Proficient in PyTorch and familiar with modern ML frameworks and tooling.
• Strong Python engineering skills, confident with git and version control, and a commitment to clean, maintainable research code.
• Outcome-driven, detail-oriented, and motivated to push state-of-the‑art research into real product impact.
• Clear communicator of hypotheses, experiments, and results.

Responsibilities

• Adapt diffusion models to incorporate diverse conditioning signals (e.g., audio, motion, interaction cues).
• Develop methods for streaming infinitely long video sequences at real-time rates.
• Work on the perceptual layer of interactive agents, including understanding user audio and generating appropriate contextual reactions.
• Improve lip-sync accuracy, motion realism, and overall visual quality in video diffusion models.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks and test suites to enable continuous quality tracking.
• Collaborate closely with our data team to define data needs and ensure high-quality datasets.
• Stay up to date with research in world models, interactive human/agent modeling, diffusion models, and related areas.

Skills

Diffusion models

PyTorch

Python

Computer vision

Research to product impact

Git / version control

Communication of hypotheses/results

Tools

Git

Data pipelines

Job description

Synthesia is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join our Interactive Avatars Team within the R&D Department. You will work on cutting-edge generative AI challenges centered on avatar-centric video diffusion models and real-world deployment used by tens of thousands of businesses.

You will own end-to-end model development, from data preparation to training and evaluation, collaborating with data engineers and product teams to turn research into production features.