Senior Research Scientist, Generative AI

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. The Company’s three core products are Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world; Lens Studio, an augmented reality platform that powers AR across Snapchat and other services; and its AR glasses, Spectacles.

Snap Research serves as an innovation engine for the company. Our projects range from solutions to hard technical problems that significantly enhance Snap’s existing products, to riskier explorations that can lead to fundamental paradigm shifts in the way people communicate and express themselves. The team consists of scientists and engineers who experiment with and invent new technology that has a lasting impact on Snap’s products. 

We are looking for a Research Scientist to join the Creative Vision Research Team! At Creative Vision, we focus on making everyone into a creator. We believe creativity is achieved when technology understands the world, humans and objects, provides a range of creative generation and manipulation tools and efficient real-time experiences. Our technology impacts and contributes to multiple products at Snap. 

What you’ll do:

• Define, lead and execute a multi-year research agenda

• Architect and implement large-scale multimodal generative projects

• Share your expertise with other teammates and interns

• Publish your work to top conferences

• Partner with engineering teams to deliver your technology to millions of Snapchatters

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities:

• Strong technical knowledge of statistics, machine learning, vision and state-of-the-art deep learning literature

• Proven record of defining, leading and executing challenging research projects

• Strong computer science fundamentals, problem solving skills, programming (Python, C, C++)

• Proven ability to lead interns, PhD students, junior researchers or ML engineers

Minimum Qualifications: 

• PhD in a related technical field such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, machine learning or equivalent years of experience 

• 2+ years of industry or postdoc experience with large scale generative AI, building foundational models, and large model training in academia or industry

• Experience with large scale, distributed training across hundreds of machines and cloud computing

• Experience with large-scale data collection and annotation best practices

• Track record of publications in top-tier international research venues (e.g. ICLR, AAAI, NeurIPS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, SIGGRAPH) 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with multimodal machine learning, involving images, videos, audio, text, speech

• Experience with 3D computer vision, non-rigid and articulated 3D registration and synthesis

• Experience with efficient Gen AI techniques, such as quantization, pruning, distillation, efficient training for generation and understanding, parameter- and data-efficient learning, and efficient VLMs

• Experience with low level vision techniques, such as image and video quality assessment, compression, restoration, and super-resolution

• Experience with 3D Articulated human motion generation 

• Experience with CUDA framework and low level optimization of generative pipelines for training and inference

• Strong theoretical background in generative modeling and diffusion models

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please don’t be shy and provide us some information.

"Default Together" Policy at Snap: At Snap Inc. we believe that being together in person helps us build our culture faster, reinforce our values, and serve our community, customers and partners better through dynamic collaboration. To reflect this, we practice a “default together” approach and expect our team members to work in an office 4+ days per week. 

At Snap, we believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together will enable us to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate. Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and 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, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. EOE, including disability/vets.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, where applicable).

Our Benefits: Snap Inc. is its own community, so we’ve got your back! We do our best to make sure you and your loved ones have everything you need to be happy and healthy, on your own terms. Our benefits are built around your needs and 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!

Compensation

In the United States, work locations are assigned a pay zone which determines the salary range for the position. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. The starting pay may be negotiable within the salary range for the position. These pay zones may be modified in the future.

Zone A (CA, WA, NYC):

Zone B:

Zone C:

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