Research Scientist, Animation Direction, Level 4 Job at Snap Inc. in Bellevue

Overview

Snap Inc. is a technology company focused on camera-powered experiences. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Snap contributes to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. The Company’s core products are Snapchat, Lens Studio, and Spectacles.

Snap Research serves as an innovation engine for the company. Our projects range from solutions to hard technical problems that significantly enhance Snap’s existing products, to riskier explorations that can lead to fundamental paradigm shifts in the way people communicate and express themselves. The team consists of scientists and engineers who experiment with and invent new technology that has a lasting impact on Snap’s products.

Role

We are looking for a Research Scientist to join our Computational Imaging Research Team in NYC. The Computational Imaging team focuses on enhancing user experiences with our photo and short form video products, and enabling our creators to make Lenses more easily in Lens Studio. Our core focus in 2025 is on improving image and video quality (quality assessment, video super resolution, compression, image editing), and animations (animation generation, 3D avatar, video generation for animations). Our research areas include computer vision, computational imaging/photography, 3D motion/video generation, efficient VLMs, and more.

Responsibilities

• Propose and develop cutting-edge multimodal techniques for 3D human animation and video generation — enabling expressive Bitmoji avatars and next-gen Snapchat video gen experiences

• Build models that map text, audio, video, and music to 3D animation and drive video generation downstream tasks, such as background video generation for animation rendering and audio-driven lip synced video generation

• Advance avatar technologies including animatable 3D Gaussian avatars, head/body reconstruction, and animation control

• Collaborate with product teams to deploy research at scale and publish at top-tier academic venues

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities

• Ability to define impactful research problems and deliver practical solutions, both in academic and product contexts

• Deep expertise in human motion modeling, facial/body animation, and generative modeling (e.g., text-to-motion, text-to-image, text-to-video, etc)

• Familiarity with video generation, avatar representations (e.g., mesh, NeRF, Gaussian), and rendering pipelines

• Strong prototyping and engineering skills (Python, PyTorch, C++), familiar with large scale distributed ML training on GCP/AWS clusters

• Proven ability to lead and mentor interns, PhD students, and junior researchers, as well as collaborate effectively with product teams

• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in a technical field such as Computer Science/Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience

• Hands-on experience with mainstream generative models (Diffusion, Transformers, GANs, VAEs) for animation or video

• Research or product experience in either of the following: 3D human motion generation from various signals such as text or audio; image/video generation; 3D avatar reconstruction and animation; or multimodal generation

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications in top-tier venues as the main contributor (e.g., CVPR, SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR); contributed to popular open-source projects code/dataset release

• Hands-on experience in large scale dataset curation and distributed ML model training such as image/video generation model pre-training or post-training

• Strong foundation in computer vision, 3D graphics, and multimodal learning

Policy, Equity, and Benefits

"Default Together" Policy at Snap: At Snap Inc. we believe that being together in person helps us build our culture faster, reinforce our values, and serve our community, customers and partners better through dynamic collaboration. We practice a “default together” approach and expect our team members to work in an office 4+ days per week.

At Snap, we believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together enables innovation. Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable laws. EOE, including disability/vets. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact accommodations-ext@snap.com.

Benefits: Our benefits include paid parental leave, comprehensive medical coverage, emotional and mental health support programs, and compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success. Details are available at Snap Careers.

Equity and Compensation: The base salary ranges vary by location: Zone A (CA, WA, NYC) $173,000-$259,000; Zone B $164,000-$246,000; Zone C $147,000-$220,000. In the United States, work locations determine salary ranges. This position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs.

Privacy and policy: Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy can be found here. We may consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.