Research Scientist, Animation Direction, Level 4

Location: Bellevue, India | Los Angeles, Canada | New York, United States | Palo Alto, Canada | San Francisco, Canada | Seattle, India

Department: Research

Employment Type: Full time

About Snap Inc

Snap Inc is a technology company. 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.

About the Role

Snap Inc is a camera company that believes the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. We empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together through Snapchat, Lens Studio, and Spectacles AR glasses. Snap Research is our innovation engine, tackling hard technical problems to enhance existing products and pioneer paradigm shifts in communication and self-expression. Join our Computational Imaging Research Team in NYC as a Research Scientist, Animation Direction, Level 4, where you'll focus on elevating photo/video experiences and simplifying Lens creation. In 2025, we're prioritizing image/video quality enhancements (assessment, super resolution, compression, editing) and groundbreaking animations (generation, 3D avatars, video gen), leveraging computer vision, computational photography, 3D motion/video generation, and efficient VLMs—all powered by our camera-first AR innovation. In this role, you'll propose multimodal techniques for 3D human animation and video generation, creating expressive Bitmoji avatars and next-gen Snapchat experiences. You'll build models mapping text, audio, video, and music to animations, powering tasks like background video rendering and lip-synced generation. Advance animatable 3D Gaussian avatars, head/body reconstruction, and control systems while collaborating with product teams to scale deployments. Our creative culture thrives on risk-taking experimentation, ensuring your work impacts millions in real-time AR interactions via Snapchat lenses and Spectacles. We're seeking a visionary with deep expertise in motion modeling, generative AI, and video tech, ready to mentor juniors and publish at top venues. With strong engineering (Python/PyTorch/C++), distributed training experience, and a passion for camera-driven AR, you'll drive Snap's creative frontier. Snap's 'Default Together' policy unites us 4+ days weekly in-office to accelerate culture and innovation. We're proud equal opportunity employers, committed to diversity, and offer robust benefits including equity, health support, and parental leave. Compensation: Zone A (CA, WA, NYC) $173,000-$259,000 base + RSUs.

What You'll Do

• Propose and develop cutting-edge multimodal techniques for 3D human animation and video generation to enable expressive Bitmoji avatars
• Build models that map text, audio, video, and music to 3D animation and drive downstream video generation tasks
• Develop 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 in Snapchat and Lens Studio
• Publish research findings at top-tier academic venues like CVPR and SIGGRAPH
• Lead and mentor interns, PhD students, and junior researchers
• Experiment with new technologies to enhance camera-based AR experiences and short-form video products
• Optimize models for efficient VLMs in computational imaging and animation pipelines
• Contribute to improving image/video quality assessment, super resolution, and compression for Snapchat

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 (Diffusion, Transformers, GANs, VAEs) for animation or video
• Research or product experience in 3D human motion generation from various signals such as text or audio
• Research or product experience in image/video generation, 3D avatar reconstruction and animation, or multimodal generation
• Strong prototyping and engineering skills (Python, PyTorch, C++)
• Familiarity with large scale distributed ML training on GCP/AWS clusters

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

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Deep expertise in human motion modeling
• Facial and body animation techniques
• Generative modeling (text-to-motion, text-to-image, text-to-video)
• Video generation and avatar representations (mesh, NeRF, Gaussian)
• Rendering pipelines
• Python programming
• PyTorch framework
• C++ for performance-critical applications
• Distributed ML training on GCP/AWS
• Computer vision fundamentals
• 3D graphics and reconstruction
• Multimodal learning (text, audio, video)
• Problem definition and practical solution delivery
• Leadership and mentoring
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Excellent communication skills
• Prototyping speed
• Academic publishing

Our Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Comprehensive medical coverage
• Emotional and mental health support programs
• Compensation packages with equity in the form of RSUs
• "Default Together" policy fostering dynamic in-person collaboration 4+ days per week
• Opportunities to innovate in AR glasses (Spectacles) and Lens Studio
• Inclusive culture celebrating diverse backgrounds and creative expression
• Support for disabilities and special needs with accommodations

Compensation

$173,000-$259,000 annually

This position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs.

"Default Together" Policy: At Snap Inc, we practice a "default together" approach and expect team members to work in an office 4+ days per week.

Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.