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Principal Applied Research Engineer

Synthesia· Research and Development
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RemoteFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Senior individual contributor leading end-to-end offline video generation efforts, bridging pre-training and post-training, with responsibility for long-term strategy, cross-team collaboration, and shipping high-quality, human-centric avatar video models at scale.

Responsibilities

  • 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 service of shipping better models faster.
  • 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, post-training alignment, or cross-team coordination.
  • Increase the velocity at which research ships to product: accelerate problem-solving, improve research-to-production handoffs, and increase visibility of research output in partnership with PMs.
  • Coach and elevate more junior researchers and engineers toward senior technical thinking and execution.
  • Help shape team structure and refine processes to enable high-velocity, cohesive execution across research.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • A leadership style grounded in technical involvement. You lead by example, inspire through craft, and communicate with clarity.
  • Genuine hunger to unlock new capabilities and an obsession with shipping. You're not satisfied by research that stays in a notebook.

Skills

Required:Large-scale model trainingPost-training techniques (RLHF, GRPO, DPO)Data quality assessmentStrategic research leadershipCross-functional collaborationHands-on leadershipShipping research to product
Last updated Jul 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Synthesia

#1 AI Video Platform for Business

Synthesia is a #1 AI Video Platform for Business. Our AI Video Generator enables anyone to create professional videos without mics, cameras, actors, or studios. Using AI, we’re radically changing the process of video content creation, making it scalable and affordable while maintaining high quality.

AI Video GeneratorAI Video PlatformCorporate VideoCustom AvatarsLanguagesLocalizationTraining VideosVideo Production
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