Principal Applied Research Engineer

Job summary

Responsibilities

At Synthesia we really care about video generation, especially about human centric avatar video generation. This led us to release models such as EXPRESS-Video, and soon our latest video model - these are the best avatar video models in the world, and we are committed to continuing and double down…

• Own the end-to-end technical direction for offline video generation, spanning pre-training and post-training, resolving the artificial boundary between those two stages in…
• Partner with research leadership and team leads to define a unified long-term roadmap, broken into achievable objectives, and drive execution against it.
• Identify the most critical technical gaps across the video generation pipeline and jump in to unblock them, whether that means architectural decisions, training stability…
• Increase the velocity at which research ships to product: accelerate problem-solving, improve research-to-production handoffs, and increase visibility of research output in…
• Coach and elevate more junior researchers and engineers toward senior technical thinking and execution.

What they're looking for

• A proven track record training large-scale video generation models from scratch, across multiple nodes, at the scale of millions of hours of data.
• Deep experience with post-training techniques at scale: RLHF, GRPO, DPO, and the judgment to know when and how to apply them.
• A proven track record data quality and you are not reluctant to question it.
• The ability to think strategically about multi-year research direction and execute hands-on at the frontier of what the team is building.
• Strong cross-functional influence: you shape how teams work together without needing positional authority to do it.