Research Scientist, Snap Inc.
Low Level Vision, Level 4
$147-259k
Salary dependent on location. Plus equity in the form of RSUs
4+ days a week in office
Social media & camera company
Open for applications
Social media & camera company
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$147-259k
Salary dependent on location. Plus equity in the form of RSUs
4+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.
Role
Who you are
- Ability to identify and define impactful and challenging research and R&D projects in both academic and product contexts
- Ability to generate innovative research and engineering ideas through out-of-the-box thinking
- Strong prototyping, implementation, and programming skills (in Python and/or C++), such as developing or accelerating NN methods (including dataset preparation, architecture/loss design, and NN compression), or non-NN methods
- Ability to stay at the forefront of low-level vision or computational photography in academia
- Ability to remain at the cutting edge of advancements in the image/video quality industry
- Fast learner with the ability to quickly adapt to new research topics, such as image editing and efficient vision-language models
- Strong technical foundation in deep learning and computer vision
- Proven ability to lead and mentor interns, PhD students, and junior researchers, as well as collaborate effectively with product teams
- Strong and clear communication skills
- PhD in a related technical field such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, machine learning or equivalent years of experience
- Strong theoretical foundations of generative AI and practical experience training, tuning, and modifying generative models
Desirable
- Hands-on experience with on-device NN compression, such as quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, NAS, and/or other emerging techniques
- Successful record of publication in top-tier academic conferences and journals (e.g. CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH, TPAMI) or contributions to video compression standards
- Strong technical foundation in signal processing, statistics, machine learning, and computer vision
- Hands-on experience with state-of-the-art non-NN methods in image processing and their speedup on mobile devices, such as Metal for iOS, OpenGL or Vulkan for Android
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Research Scientist to join our Computational Imaging Research Team
- The Computational Imaging team in NYC focuses on enhancing user experiences with our photo and short form video products, and enabling our creators to make Lenses more easily in Lens Studio
- Specifically, our core focus in 2025 is on improving image and video quality (quality assessment, video super resolution, compression, image editing), and animations (animation generation, 3D avatar, video generation for animations)
- Our research areas include computer vision, computational imaging/photography, 3d motion/video generation, efficient VLMs, and more
- Propose and develop innovative technologies to improve image and video quality, such as (1) image/video super-resolution/restoration, (2) image/video quality assessment, or (3) advanced video codec
- Enhance the quality of AIGC-generated videos using low-level vision techniques, such as super-resolution and video frame interpolation
- Contribute to image editing, efficient vision-language model development, etc
- Partner with product teams to deliver your technologies to hundreds of millions of Snapchatters
- Work on projects including on-device neural network (NN) compression or non-NN methods speedup (optional)
- Mentor research interns, publish your research at top academic conferences or contribute to video compression standards
Our take
Snap Inc. is the social-media company behind Snapchat, a mobile app launched in 2011 that prioritises visual and emotive communication over traditional texting. Born from a desire to share real-time moments with authenticity, the app now boasts a massive global reach with daily active users surpassing 460M and monthly active users well beyond 900M.
After rejecting a billion-dollar acquisition offer from MEta Platforms (then Facebook) in 2023, Snapchat entered into a long-term rivalry with Meta's apps (most notably Instagram). Despite the competition, Snap has carved out a distinct place in the social-media landscape by innovating features such as the "Discover" tab, augmented-reality (AR) lenses, in-app gaming, paid subscriptions via Snapchat+, and robust ad-monetisation options.
Snap has yet to post a full-year profit since going public in 2017, but the company is clearly making progress. In Q1 2025 the net loss was narrowed to roughly $140M, down from $305M the year before, and revenue rose 14% to $1.36B. Advertising revenue remains periodic and macro-factors still pose headwinds, yet Snaps enduring popularity and its expanding product mix suggest that further success appears likely.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
May 2016
$1.8bn
SERIES F
Mar 2015
$200m
SERIES E
Total funding: $2.6bn
Company benefits
- Up to 28 weeks of parental leave and return-to-work program
- Adoption, surrogacy, infertility, and fertility preservation benefits
- Backup child care coverage, center-based care support, & caregiver assistance
- Dependent Daycare Flexible Spending Account
- Short-term disability, long-term disability, basic life insurance, and AD&D insurance
- Services to support your path to parenthood & beyond - fertility support & family planning via Carrot, SNOO, Hinge Health
- Lactation rooms (based on office location) and breastmilk shipping coverage
- For Snap, employees taking care of loved ones with complex, chronic, or ongoing care needs (i.e. parent with Dementia, spouse with Cancer, child with Autism), your family can save time, money, & stress with Wellthy
- Comprehensive medical coverage, including PPO, HDHP with HSA, and HMO options
- Dental coverage, including orthodontia benefits
- Vision coverage, including frame and contact allowance and LASIK benefits
- Free membership to One Medical for primary and urgent healthcare services
- Business Travel Insurance
- Gym perks and discounts
- Team fitness classes and races
- Sports leagues
- Cooking and nutritional workshops
- Well-being reimbursement
- Unlimited access to virtual physical therapy with Anthem
- 15 sessions per year of mental health for you + dependents through Lyra
- Generous time off and leave programs. In the US, this includes the following:
- Up to 3 weeks (120 hours) of vacation time and 1 floating holiday for non-exempt team members
- 12 paid holidays per year
- 15 sick and safe days per year
- Meditation and yoga classes
- Speaker series, classes, and subscriptions to educational programs
- Social gatherings, team outings, and volunteering programs
- Snap Inc. provides a 401(k) plan that allows you to save on a pre-tax, Roth, and after-tax basis for your retirement (yes, we even have the Mega backdoor option!) Snap will also match 100% up to 3% of your contribution and then 50% on your 4th and 5th%
- Flexible Spending Accounts for healthcare, daycare and commuter
- Health Savings Account with employer contributions
- Rocket Lawyer memberships
- Financial education programs
- Snap exclusive discounts and perks
- Compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success!
Company HQ
Sunset Park, Santa Monica, CA
Leadership
Evan Spiegel
(Co-Founder & CEO)Graduated from Stanford with a BS in Product Design.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 92 more jobs at Snap Inc.