Senior Research Engineer - Large Language Models

Key Skills

AWS, Effective communication skills, Large Language Models - LLMs, Machine learning techniques, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Python Programming, PyTorch

Job Description

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Research Engineer, with passion for working on cutting edge problems that can help us create highly realistic, emotional and life-like synthetic humans through text-to-video.

Our aim is to make video content creation available for all - not only to studio production!

You will be someone who loves to code and build working systems. You are used to working in a fast-paced start-up environment. You will have experience with the software development life cycle, from ideation through implementation, to testing and release. 

You will join a group of more than 40 Engineers in the R&D department and will have the opportunity to collaborate with multiple research teams across diverse areas, our R&D research is guided by our co-founders - Prof. Lourdes Agapito, Prof. Matthias Niessner and Director of Science Vittorio Ferrari.

If you know and love LLMs, or have experience fine tuning LLMs with additional modalities - then we would love to talk to you. We will also want to talk to you - if that's what you dream of doing. 

What will you be doing?

Our NLP team is working on creating a virtual director that will automatically generate the best video and best avatar performance based on the context of a user script. Very much like the real world where a director can help create a powerful performance by directing the actors and guiding other aspects of the video. The team is focused on extracting cues from a large pool of proprietary video and audio data in order to train a virtual director. The findings within the NLP team are very important in driving the direction for other teams within the R&D.

In this position, you'll join the team to help train LLMs for text or multi-modal tasks that will help us create human-like avatars and effective powerful videos. You will also help us create high quality, production ready code and take ownership of production pipelines. This would include: 

• Assist in finding and collecting appropriate data for the tasks.
• Make sure we have correct pipelines in place to ingest data from existing processed data, text, voice and video and adjust granularity.
• Analyse and pre-process data if necessary.
• Help define and run experimentation to facilitate predicting emotion signals from different architecture choices of the adapted LLM.
• Take hypotheses, ideas or papers and create implementations of solutions on the back of these
• Run experiments on the back of the created implementations that evaluate and verify hypotheses
• Contribute to a high-quality codebase, develop tests where necessary, and participate in code reviews.
• Help a team of research engineers, scientists and linguists to write clean and efficient code, and define best practices
• Developing production quality software, our teams work “full stack” with the ability to deliver direct to product and impact the world.

Who are you?

• You have a background in Computer Science and 5+ years of relevant experience.
• You have substantial experience working with and training Large Language Models on sizeable clusters, applying this knowledge to practical scenarios.
• You demonstrate excellent Python coding skills and have a deep interest in the software development aspect of ML.
• You possess a research-oriented mindset, constantly exploring new techniques and solutions, and are adept at finding what works best in a given scenario.
• And finally..You have excellent verbal and written communication skills and you are passionate about what you do!

Nice to have…

• Advanced expertise in PyTorch, with a deep understanding of its distributed and parallel approaches, as well as the related tools and frameworks.
• Proficiency in state-of-the-art frameworks, with proven experience leveraging these tools to optimise and accelerate ML model training and inference: DeepSpeed, ZeRo, LoRA, Quantization, 3D parallelism, distillation, Bitsandbytes.
• Extensive experience with AWS, including a strong understanding of its various services and how they can be integrated for robust, scalable ML solutions.
• Experience with different modalities (image / audio).

The good stuff...

You will be compensated well (salary + stock options + bonus)

You will work in a hybrid setting with an office in London

You get a cycle to work salary sacrifice scheme to commute to the office

You get 25 days of annual leave + public holidays Your will get Private Health Insurance You will join an established company culture with regular socials and company retreats

 You get 4 weeks paid sabbatical after 4 years at the company + $10,000!!

You can participate in a generous referral scheme

 You will have huge opportunities for your career growth

You can learn more about our Research here: https://www.synthesia.io/research