Staff Research Scientist - Interactive Avatars

About the role

Synthesia, an AI video platform for business, is hiring a Staff Research Scientist to join its R&D team of 40+ researchers and engineers. The role sits within the Interactive Avatars team, which builds avatar-centric, interactive video diffusion models that hold natural, real-time conversations with users.

Key responsibilities

• Set the research direction and roadmap for dyadic interaction modeling, balancing long-term bets with near-term product impact.
• Advance 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 the data team to define data needs and shape high-quality datasets.
• Lead and mentor a small group of researchers and drive technical decisions across research, data and engineering.

Required profile

• Deep ML expertise and extensive hands-on experience with diffusion models, ideally for video or avatar generation.
• A strong publication record at top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGGRAPH) in areas such as world models, dyadic interaction or video diffusion, or equivalent demonstrated impact.
• Experience leading a small team of researchers and mentoring junior members.
• A track record of taking research from idea to production.
• Clear communication of hypotheses, experiments and results, and the ability to influence direction across teams.

Required skills

• Proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML tooling for large-scale training.
• Nice to have: real-time or streaming generation, distillation or other low-latency inference techniques, audio-driven motion modeling, and conversational modeling such as turn-taking and backchanneling.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation.
• Hybrid work with an office in London, Zurich, Munich or remote in Europe.
• 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays.
• Company culture with regular planning and socials at the hubs, plus other benefits depending on location.