Research Scientist, Snap
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
Be an early applicant
Social media & camera company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$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 is the social media giant that owns Snapchat, a social media mobile app released in 2011. Created to serve as a more emotive communication form than texting, the app has gained mass popularity, reaching upwards of 400 million daily users worldwide.
After rejecting a billion dollar acquisition from Meta (then Facebook) in 2013, Snap has found itself in competition with the social media giant, particularly with Instagram. Despite this, the company has marked a place for itself in the ever competitive social media space through developing features like a Discover tab, augmented reality lenses, in-app games, ads and monetisation options, as well as launching its paid service, Snapchat+.
Snap has so far not earned an annual profit since going public in 2017, but as Snapchat's user base has continually increased it has nearly closed the gap. Like other tech companies it suffered in late 2022 due to a surprise drop in advertising revenue, but has been rebuilding to its former trajectory since then. Given Snapchat's lasting popularity amongst young people, 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
- Paid maternity, paternity and family caregiver leave
- Adoption, surrogacy, infertility and fertility preservation benefits
- Backup child care coverage, caregiver assistance and digital maternity care support
- Short-term disability, long-term disability, life insurance and AD&D insurance
- Comprehensive medical coverage, including PPO, HSA and HMO options
- Dental coverage, including orthodontia benefits
- Vision coverage, including LASIK benefits
- Gym perks and discounts
- Team fitness classes, hikes and races
- Sports leagues
- Cooking and nutritional workshops
- Generous time off and leave programmes
- Meditation and yoga classes
- Emotional and mental health support programmes and apps
- Social gatherings, team outings and volunteering programmes
- Speaker series, classes and subscriptions to educational programmes
- 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!)
- Rocket Lawyer memberships
- Financial education programmes
- Compensation packages that let you share in Snap's long-term success!
- Have a teammate going through a tough time? Lend them a hand through our internal Snap-a-wish programme! We'll work hard to make sure they get the support they need.
Company HQ
Sunset Park, Santa Monica, CA
Leadership
Evan Spiegel
(CEO)Graduated from Standford with a BS in Product Design.
Bobby Murphy
(CTO)Studied Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford.
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