Engineering Manager, Avatars

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.

Lead the delivery of complex engineering projects in AI-powered video, avatar rendering, and generative media systems. Break down ambiguous, research-heavy initiatives into structured execution plans with predictable timelines. Make informed trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and scalability, and communicate these clearly to stakeholders.

Challenge and support senior engineers working across backend systems, frontend rendering, and AI integrations to achieve technical excellence. Drive high standards in system design, reliability, and performance.

Understand engineering leveling and scale the team by identifying and filling skill gaps across distributed systems, AI integrations, and media pipelines. Partner with recruiting to build a world-class team capable of pushing the boundaries of generative video technology.

Monitor team performance proactively, addressing issues in delivery, system reliability, or quality. Create growth opportunities for engineers working on cutting-edge technical problems.

Navigate difficult conversations with clarity and empathy, especially in high-complexity technical discussions. Align decisions with long-term product and infrastructure strategy.

The Avatars & Generative Media team focuses on enabling anyone to create professional, natural video without technical complexity by advancing AI-powered avatar rendering, video/image generation, and motion graphics.

The team owns:

• Avatar creation, customization, and in-editor placement

• Integration of generative AI models for video and image generation

• A provider-agnostic framework for evaluating and integrating new AI models

• Close collaboration with R&D teams to bring new capabilities into production

This is a highly technical team working across backend services, frontend rendering, and AI infrastructure.

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering complex, technically challenging projects (2+ years)

• Strong systems thinking across distributed systems, APIs, and performance-sensitive applications

• Experience working with or alongside AI/ML systems or media pipelines is a strong plus

• Proven ability to scale teams and develop senior engineers

• Strong track record in improving system reliability, performance, and developer productivity

• Excellent communication skills, especially in deep technical discussions

• Relevant engineering background building enterprise-grade SaaS products

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,

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.

We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2.

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.

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.

1. 30-40min call with a Technical Recruiter

2. 45min call with an Engineering Manager

3. Take-home assignment (no coding required) - writing an RFC, solution proposal

4. 60min task debrief and technical discussion

5. 45min call with leadership

The process does not need to take long - we can be done in seven working days.

Other important info:

• Our preference is for this role to based either in-office or remote in the following locations: UK, Germany, Switzerland or Ireland.
  We may also be able to support remote workers in other locations across Europe subject to compliance and right to work checks.

• The salary starts at EUR/GBP/CHF 160,000 base + stock option plan.

• This is full-time employment only - no contractors possible - usually through OysterHR.

• Everyone at Synthesia gets 25 days of leave + local holidays (no extra paid or unpaid leave possible).

• We only sponsor VISA if you are in the UK/EU country already and need support.