Staff Backend Engineer, Avatars

About the role

You will work on the core systems powering Avatars and Generative Media , one of the most critical areas of Synthesia's product. You will take ownership of the system design and architecture behind avatars , ensuring it remains scalable, reliable, and extensible as the product evolves. 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 . 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. 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. You will collaborate closely with: Product and design to ensure system decisions align with user needs R&D teams to integrate model capabilities into production systems Adjacent product teams such as Voices and Video Generation to ensure seamless integration You will take a long-term view of the system, ensuring that what is built today can support future iterations, increased scale, and new product capabilities . You will act as a technical steward for the codebase , helping maintain high standards for structure, maintainability, and extensibility as the system grows.

Requirements

• You have significant experience as a software engineer, operating at a senior or staff level , with a strong focus on backend systems and architecture.
• You have deep expertise in system design and data modelling , particularly in product-facing systems with real user impact.
• You have experience building systems that need to evolve over time , and understand the trade-offs required to balance speed, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• You are comfortable operating with broad scope and ambiguity , and can think beyond individual projects to how systems fit together across teams.
• You have strong product awareness , and can clearly connect technical decisions to customer needs and business outcomes.
• You are experienced in building and operating reliable systems , with an understanding of performance, latency, and availability requirements for critical product flows.
• You are collaborative and able to work across teams, influencing system design decisions that span multiple domains.
• You are hands-on and care about code quality and structure , not just high-level architecture.
• Experience working on customer-facing products , large-scale systems, or platforms that integrate across multiple teams is highly valuable.
• Why join us?
• We're living the golden age of AI. The next decade will yield the next iconic companies, and we dare to say we have what it takes to become one. Here's why,
• Our culture
• Serving 50,000+ customers (and 50% of the Fortune 500)
• We're trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald's and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2 .
• Proprietary AI technology
• Since 2017, we've been pioneering advancements in Generative AI. Our AI technology is built in-house, by a team of world-class AI researchers and engineers. Learn more about our AI Research Lab and the team behind.
• AI Safety, Ethics and Security
• AI safety, ethics, and security are fundamental to our mission. While the full scope of Artificial Intelligence's impact on our society is still unfolding, our position is clear: People first. Always. Learn more about our commitments to AI Ethics, Safety & Security .
• The hiring process:
• 30-40min call with our Technical Recruiter
• 45min call with an Engineering Manager about your past projects
• 90min Live Coding

Additional Information

Synthesia is the world's leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow.

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