Staff Research Scientist- Interactive Avatars

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Research Scientist – Interactive Avatars based in France.

This is a senior research role at the forefront of generative AI, focused on building the next generation of interactive, avatar-based video agents. You’ll work within a multidisciplinary R&D organization combining research, engineering, and data expertise. Your focus will be on creating models that can understand audio and visual signals and respond with natural, human-like conversational behavior. You’ll shape research direction while balancing ambitious long-term opportunities with near-term product impact. The role combines deep technical research, hands-on model development, evaluation, and research leadership. You’ll also mentor researchers and influence technical decisions across multiple teams, helping transform breakthrough ideas into production-ready capabilities.

Accountabilities:
- Define the research direction and roadmap for dyadic interaction modeling, balancing long-term research opportunities with immediate product priorities.

- Advance the perceptual capabilities of interactive AI agents, including understanding user audio and video and generating contextually appropriate responses.

- Develop and post-train multimodal models capable of producing rich, natural, and responsive dyadic interactions from audio and video inputs.

- Adapt and extend diffusion models to incorporate conversational conditioning signals such as dialogue state, turn-taking, listener cues, and contextual reactions.

- Research and develop models capable of generating natural conversational behaviors, including gaze, facial expressions, body reactions, and backchannel responses.

- Design robust evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and automated test suites to continuously measure interaction quality.

- Collaborate closely with data specialists to define data requirements and shape high-quality datasets for model development and training.

- Lead technical decisions spanning research, data, and engineering, ensuring strong alignment between research goals and product requirements.

- Lead and mentor a small team of researchers, supporting their technical development and helping establish a high-performing research culture.

- Drive research projects from initial hypothesis and experimentation through validation, productionization, and product impact.

- Communicate research hypotheses, methodologies, experimental results, and technical recommendations clearly to both research and cross-functional audiences.

Requirements:

- Deep expertise in machine learning with extensive hands-on experience working with diffusion models, ideally applied to video generation, avatar generation, or related multimodal applications.

- Strong research track record demonstrated through publications at leading conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or SIGGRAPH, or equivalent evidence of significant research impact.

- Expertise in areas such as video diffusion, world models, dyadic interaction modeling, multimodal generation, or related fields.

- Proven experience leading a small team of researchers and mentoring junior research talent.

- Demonstrated ability to take research concepts from initial idea through experimentation and into production systems.

- Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern machine learning tooling for large-scale model training.

- Strong understanding of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and large-scale ML experimentation.

- Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a rigorous approach to designing experiments and evaluating results.

- Clear communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts, influence research direction, and collaborate effectively across teams.

- Strong ownership and ability to operate in a fast-moving research environment where experimentation and iteration are encouraged.

Nice to have:

- Experience with real-time or streaming generation, including autoregressive video diffusion.

- Expertise in model distillation or other techniques designed to achieve low-latency inference.

- Experience with audio-driven facial animation, gesture generation, or full-body motion modeling.

- Experience in conversational modeling, including turn-taking, backchanneling, listener-response generation, or related interaction behaviors.

- Experience developing AI systems designed for real-time human-machine interaction.

Benefits:

- Competitive compensation package.

- Fully remote working option within Europe.

- Hybrid working opportunities for employees based near London, Munich, or Zurich offices.

- 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays.

- Opportunity to work alongside a large team of AI researchers and engineers at the forefront of generative AI.

- Direct opportunity to influence the research roadmap and development of emerging interactive AI technologies.

- Strong culture focused on building, experimentation, autonomy, and high-impact execution.

- Regular opportunities to connect with colleagues through office hubs, planning sessions, and social events.

- Collaborative environment with access to multidisciplinary expertise across research, engineering, and data.

- Opportunity to mentor researchers and contribute to the development of advanced AI research capabilities.

- Work on real-world AI products used by leading organizations across multiple industries.

- Commitment to responsible AI, with strong emphasis on safety, ethics, security, and human-centered technology.

- Additional location-specific benefits depending on where you are based.