Staff Backend Engineer, Avatars

Synthesia Synthesia · Multimodal · EUROPE · Engineering

Staff Backend Engineer role focused on the core systems powering Avatars and Generative Media for Synthesia's AI video platform. The role involves system design, architecture, scalability, reliability, and integration with voice and video pipelines, ensuring avatars function as a first-class entity. It requires a long-term view, technical stewardship, and collaboration with product, R&D, and adjacent teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. You will work on the core systems powering Avatars and Generative Media, one of the most critical areas of Synthesia’s product.
  2. You will take ownership of the system design and architecture behind avatars, ensuring it remains scalable, reliable, and extensible as the product evolves.
  3. You will design systems that support complex product requirements such as avatar versions, sharing across users and organisations, personalisation, and integration with voice and video pipelines.
  4. You will play a key role in ensuring avatars function as a first-class entity across the platform, working closely with multiple teams to define how avatars are created, stored, and used throughout the product.
  5. You will be responsible for evolving systems that sit on a critical path for video generation, where reliability, latency, and consistency directly impact the end-user experience.

Skills

Required

  • significant experience as a software engineer
  • senior or staff level
  • strong focus on backend systems and architecture
  • deep expertise in system design and data modelling
  • experience building systems that need to evolve over time
  • comfortable operating with broad scope and ambiguity
  • strong product awareness
  • experienced in building and operating reliable systems
  • understanding of performance, latency, and availability requirements for critical product flows
  • collaborative and able to work across teams
  • hands-on and care about code quality and structure

Nice to have

  • experience working on customer-facing products
  • large-scale systems
  • platforms that integrate across multiple teams

What the JD emphasized

  • critical areas of Synthesia’s product
  • critical path for video generation
  • customer-facing products
  • senior or staff level
  • system design and architecture

Other signals

  • AI video platform
  • Generative Media
  • avatar systems
  • customer-facing products