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

Research Scientist, Animation Direction, Level 4

Snap Inc is a technology company that believes 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.

Snap Research serves as an innovation engine for the company, experimenting with and inventing new technology that has a lasting impact on Snap’s products. The Computational Imaging team in NYC focuses on enhancing user experiences with photo and short-form video products and enabling creators to make Lenses more easily in Lens Studio.

The core focus of the team in 2025 is on improving image and video quality and animations. Research areas include computer vision, computational imaging/photography, 3D motion/video generation, efficient VLMs, and more.

As a Research Scientist, you will:

• Propose and develop cutting-edge multimodal techniques for 3D human animation and video generation
• Build models that map text, audio, video, and music to 3D animation and drive video generation downstream tasks
• 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

Requirements include:

• Ability to define impactful research problems and deliver practical solutions
• Deep expertise in human motion modeling, facial/body animation, and generative modeling
• Familiarity with video generation, avatar representations, and rendering pipelines
• Strong prototyping and engineering skills
• Proven ability to lead and mentor interns, PhD students, and junior researchers

Minimum qualifications:

• PhD in a related technical field such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, machine learning or equivalent years of experience
• Strong theoretical foundations of generative AI and practical experience training, tuning, and modifying generative models
• Hands-on experience with mainstream generative models for animation or video
• Research or product experience in 3D human motion generation, image/video generation, or multimodal generation

Preferred qualifications:

• Publications in top-tier venues as the main contributor
• Hands-on experience in large-scale dataset curation and distributed ML model training
• Strong foundation in computer vision, 3D graphics, and multimodal learning

Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is 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.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. 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.

The base salary range for this position is $173,000-$259,000 annually, depending on the location and qualifications.