---
title: 'Staff Research Scientist- Interactive Avatars at Synthesia'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-research-scientist-interactive-avatars-synthesia-europe-cs4zc23j0t6b'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-20'
---

# Staff Research Scientist- Interactive Avatars at Synthesia

- **Company:** [Synthesia](https://feeny.ai/companies/synthesia)
- **Location:** Europe
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/synthesia/776f612e-cd1d-4386-9d24-8d101d5ee5d7

## Job description

Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow.

## About the role

As a Staff Research Scientist, you will join a team of 40+ researchers and engineers in our R&D department, working on the frontier of generative AI with a focus on avatar-centric, interactive video diffusion models. This is a unique opportunity for experts in machine learning and diffusion models to shape the future of AI video agents that listen, respond, and react like humans. As part of our Interactive Avatars team, you'll build models that hold natural, real-time conversations: understanding what a user says and how they say it, then responding with appropriate turn-taking, backchannels, gaze, and facial and body reactions. You'll join a team that moves fast, iterates often, and turns breakthrough research into product capabilities that ship.

## What you'll do

- Set the research direction and roadmap for dyadic interaction modeling, balancing long-term bets with near-term product impact.
- Advance the state of the art in 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 our 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.

What we're looking for:

- 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 (e.g., 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.
- Proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML tooling for large-scale training.
- Clear communication of hypotheses, experiments, and results, and the ability to influence direction across teams.

## Nice to have

- Experience with real-time or streaming generation, including autoregressive video diffusion.
- Distillation or other techniques for low-latency inference.
- Audio-driven facial, gesture, or full-body motion modeling.
- Conversational modeling, such as turn-taking, backchanneling, or listener-response generation.

Why join us? We’re living the golden age of AI. The next decade will yield the next iconic companies, and we dare to say we have what it takes to become one. Here’s why, Our culture At Synthesia we’re 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. [You can find out more about these principles here.](https://www.notion.so/How-we-work-at-Synthesia-f794caa72f8446efb6be22b551ce0fa2?pvs=21) Serving 50,000+ customers (and 50% of the Fortune 500) We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. Read [stories from happy customers](https://www.synthesia.io/case-studies) and what [1,200+ people say on G2](https://www.g2.com/products/synthesia/reviews#reviews). Proprietary AI technology Since 2017, we’ve been pioneering advancements in Generative AI. Our AI technology is built in-house, by a team of world-class AI researchers and engineers. Learn more about [our AI Research Lab and the team behind.](https://www.synthesia.io/research) AI Safety, Ethics and Security AI safety, ethics, and security are fundamental to our mission. While the full scope of Artificial Intelligence's impact on our society is still unfolding, our position is clear: People first. Always.  Learn more about [our commitments to AI Ethics, Safety & Security](https://www.synthesia.io/ethics). The good stuff...

- Competitive compensation
- Hybrid work setting with an office in London, 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
- + other benefits depending on your location

You can see more about Who we are and How we work here:https://www.synthesia.io/careers

## About Synthesia

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Synthesia is an all-in-one AI video platform that enables businesses to create, localize, manage, and publish professional-quality videos using AI avatars and voiceovers, without any filming equipment or video editing skills.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Victor Riparbelli (CEO), Prof. Lourdes Agapito, Steffen Tjerrild (COO), Prof. Matt Niessner

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Video Platform / Enterprise SaaS / Creative Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (trusted by 50,000+ teams globally, including 90% of the Fortune 100)
- **Mission statement**: "Helping people work better" — transforming how organizations train, onboard, and upskill their employees with AI.

## Products & Services
- **Synthesia AI Video Platform (Core)**: Full-stack SaaS platform for creating AI videos. Includes AI avatars (240+), AI voices in 160+ languages, 1-click translation, real-time team collaboration, version control, brand kit management, analytics (views, drop-offs, completion rates), and SCORM export for LMS integration.
- **AI Avatars**: Customizable, expressive AI avatars that speak 160+ languages. Users can also create their own custom avatar.
- **AI Screen Recorder**: Polished screen recordings with instant transcripts (removes 'ums' and 'uhs'), editable and translatable.
- **Multilingual Video Player**: Single player to watch and organize videos in 160+ languages.
- **AI Video Assistant & Academy**: Tutorials and onboarding tools to help users create videos quickly.
- **Enterprise Security Suite**: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 42001 compliant, with SAML/SSO. Designed to satisfy the toughest legal and security teams at Fortune 100 companies.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/ Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (last known funding round: Series C, $180M raised, led by Accel and Nvidia in 2023, valuing the company at $1B+ — Unicorn status).
- **Key Metric**: **$100M+ Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)** — announced by COO & Co-founder Steffen Tjerrild in a public LinkedIn post [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/steffentjerrild_probably-the-milestone-im-most-proud-of-activity-7317848922612224001-UuZ1)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Accel, Nvidia (lead Series C), with previous investors including Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital, and MMC Ventures. The company has an active partnership ecosystem including integrations with LMS providers and enterprise tooling.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Crossed $100M ARR (strong product-market fit and revenue growth).
  - Used by 90% of the Fortune 100 and 50,000+ teams.
  - Engineering team scaled from 0 to 80+ engineers.
  - Over 1M+ users on the platform.
  - Hiring in 26+ countries with offices in London and NYC.
  - Continues to expand product suite (AI avatars, video agents, analytics, and skill development products).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary AI & Avatars**: Deep AI research spanning computer vision, graphics, and NLP (co-founders from Stanford, Cambridge, UCL, TUM). Avatars are highly expressive and support 160+ languages with accurate lip-sync.
- **Enterprise Security & Compliance**: SOC2, GDPR, ISO42001, SAML/SSO — a key differentiator for Fortune 100 clients who require stringent security.
- **End-to-End Platform**: Combines creation, localization, management, analytics, and version control in one tool — reducing reliance on multiple vendors and agencies.
- **AI Ethics-First**: 10% of the team is dedicated to AI safety and ethics, a strong trust signal for enterprise buyers.
- **Velocity & Innovation**: Engineering team delivers meaningful features every few days, not weeks, enabling rapid iteration.

## Strategic Focus
- **Enterprise Scale & Platform Depth**: Deepening integrations with enterprise tooling (LMS, security suites) and expanding video product suite (Avatars, Agents, skill development).
- **Global Localization**: Strengthening 160+ language support and 1-click translation to serve multinational enterprises.
- **AI Ethics & Trust**: Maintaining a dedicated ethics team and proactive AI policy engagement to stay ahead of regulation and build customer trust.
- **Product Expansion**: Moving from video creation to a broader "visual communication" platform including AI Agents and analytics-driven optimization.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Scaling the global team across engineering, research, and go-to-market functions, with a focus on high-velocity engineering culture.

## Why Work Here
- **Global & Remote-First Culture**: Team spans 26+ countries. Offices in London and NYC, with remote work flexibility. Roughly 80% of London HQ staff are immigrants, fostering a diverse, international environment.
- **High-Velocity Engineering**: Engineers deliver meaningful features every few days (no long releases). Minimal meetings and SCRUM ceremonies — a focus on building and shipping.
- **Growth & Ownership**: Real ownership from day one. Clear progression paths, annual learning budget, access to courses and conferences.
- **People-First & AI Ethics**: 10% of team dedicated to AI safety. Strong emphasis on work-life balance with competitive compensation, PTO, and benefits.
- **H-1B Friendly**: CEO Victor Riparbelli has publicly highlighted that the London office provides a strong alternative to US visa uncertainty, with ~80% of staff being immigrants.
- **Top-Tier Team**: Founders and engineering leadership from Stanford, Cambridge, UCL, TUM, and top tech companies.

## Sources
1. [synthesia.io/about](https://www.synthesia.io/about)
2. [synthesia.io](https://www.synthesia.io/)
3. [synthesia.io/careers](https://www.synthesia.io/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/synthesia-technologies](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/synthesia-technologies)
5. [pitchbook.com/profiles/company/267090-49](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/267090-49)
6. [linkedin.com/posts/steffentjerrild](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/steffentjerrild_probably-the-milestone-im-most-proud-of-activity-7317848922612224001-UuZ1)
7. [linkedin.com/posts/victorriparbelli](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/victorriparbelli_h-1bs-are-causing-a-lot-of-uncertainty-right-activity-7375861659610836993-UULl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABVaNoYBu2QiVriT0MMLe-cbAPv2sPNI2cA)

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