Senior Research Engineer - Video in Manchester

Welcome to the video first world. 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. 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.

Meet Synthesia. We’re on a mission to make video easy for everyone. 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.

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.

In this position, you’ll join our Post-Training Team that works on generative video creation. You will make it possible to apply our foundational models to production use cases. This includes projects such as:

• Apply DPO (direct preference optimisation) to pre-trained models.
• Adapt models to extend their capabilities, for instance, by changing conditioning inputs.
• Build solutions for dubbing and evaluate the quality of lip-sync.
• Implement post-training optimization techniques, such as quantization, pruning and distillation, to improve the efficiency of diffusion models used in avatar generation.
• Analyze and address challenges related to model performance, ensuring high-quality output in avatar rendering.
• Stay updated with the latest research and advancements in diffusion models, adversarial networks and post-training optimization methods.

What we’re looking for:

• You have a background in Computer Vision / Computer Science and 3+ years of industry experience.
• You have knowledge of recent advancements in post-training techniques.
• You have worked with generative models for images and/or videos (Diffusion/GAN) preferably in the avatar domain.
• You are interested in doing research, trying new things and pushing the boundaries.
• 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.

Why join us? We’re living the golden age of AI. Our culture at Synthesia is passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible.

The good stuff...

• Competitive compensation (salary + stock options + bonus).
• Hybrid work setting with an office in London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich, or remote in Europe.
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays.
• Great company culture with the option to join regular planning and socials at our hubs.