Sr. Research Engineer - Avatar Pre-Training

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. In 2025 we announced our series D funding. In total we’ve raised over $330M in funding from top-tier investors, including NEA, Atlassian Ventures, WiL, PSP Growth, and existing investors such as Accel, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, GV and top founders and operators including Stripe, Datadog, Miro, Webflow, and Facebook.

About the role

As a 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 and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you are an expert in training Diffusion models for generative AI, 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?

You will join our video Pre-Training team focusing on multimodal inputs and you will contribute to advancing generative video creation! 
In this position, you will help enhance our models, enabling avatars to deliver natural, expressive, and emotionally rich performances. Your responsibilities will include:

• Conduct research and literature reviews to identify emerging trends and propose innovative ideas.
• Develop and implement cutting-edge video diffusion models, focusing on multi-modal conditioning.
• Train large-scale models across multiple nodes for optimal performance.
• Clearly evaluate, document and, communicate research findings.
• Collaborate and plan with the team to translate research concepts into real-world products.

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 image or video Models
• You have trained large models across multiple nodes before.
• You have strong experience in the video space (Diffusion models / GAN’s), preferably in the Avatar or generative video or image domain
• You have experience with model conditioning and multi-modal architectures
• 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 clean code.
• You have experience with SDLC tools (Git), preferably CI/CD.

The good stuff...

• Attractive compensation  (salary + stock options + bonus)
• Private Health Insurance in London
• Hybrid work setting with an office in London, Amsterdam, Munich, or Zurich
• 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
• 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

 LI-MD1