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 Switzerland. 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.