Principal Applied Research Engineer

Synthesia
London
Workplace: RemoteFull timeFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Skills: ["Communication","Leadership","Problem-solving"]

Senior individual contributor leading the end-to-end technical stack for offline video generation, spanning pre-training and post-training. Defines long-term roadmaps with research leadership, unblocks cross-team technical gaps, accelerates research-to-product handoffs, and mentors junior researchers while shaping team structure for high-velocity, cohesive execution in a growing AI video generation platform.

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FursaFursa
Synthesia
Synthesia
3 months ago

Principal Applied Research Engineer

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 8 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Senior individual contributor leading the end-to-end technical stack for offline video generation, spanning pre-training and post-training. Defines long-term roadmaps with research leadership, unblocks cross-team technical gaps, accelerates research-to-product handoffs, and mentors junior researchers while shaping team structure for high-velocity, cohesive execution in a growing AI video generation platform.
Location: London
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)

Key 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.

Key Requirements

  • •Proven track record training large-scale video generation models from scratch across multiple nodes and millions of hours of data.
  • •Deep experience with post-training techniques at scale (RLHF, GRPO, DPO) and the judgment to apply them effectively.
  • •Strong focus on data quality and willingness to challenge it to improve outcomes.
  • •Ability to think strategically about multi-year research direction and execute hands-on at the frontier of the team's work.
  • •Strong cross-functional influence and leadership style grounded in technical involvement; able to lead by example and communicate clearly.
Experience:Video generationGenerative models
Skills:CommunicationLeadershipProblem-solving
Languages:English
Tech Stack:Distributed trainingPre-trainingPost-trainingRLHFGRPODPO

Company Brief

Synthesia
Provides an AI video generation platform that creates realistic synthetic presenters and video content from text, enabling enterprises to produce scalable training, marketing, and communications videos without cameras or actors.
Industry: AI & Machine Learning
Company Size: Large (251 to 1,000 employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series C
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 2017
WebsiteLinkedIn