AI/ML Engineer — Generative Video & Avatar AI

Location: Palo Alto, CA

AI/ML Engineer — Generative Video & Avatar AI — Palo Alto, CA (On-site)

About the Role
We are building the next generation of realtime, interactive AI avatars — lifelike digital humans that see, listen, and respond with natural speech and expressive motion. We are hiring a strong AI Engineer to help us train, fine-tune, and serve the generative models that power these avatars. You will work across the full model lifecycle — from data curation and training of diffusion, video, and multimodal models, to low-latency inference optimization for live, streaming deployments.

Your work will directly shape how millions of end users experience AI — turning static chatbots into engaging, face-to-face digital humans that deliver VIP-level customer experiences in real time.

What You'll Work On
• Train and fine-tune state-of-the-art generative models for talking-head synthesis, audio-driven facial animation, and full-body avatar video (e.g., diffusion models, DiT, 3D Gaussian Splatting, GAN-based and transformer-based video generators).
• Design data pipelines for large-scale video, audio, and multimodal datasets — including collection, cleaning, labeling, alignment, and augmentation.
• Optimize models for realtime, low-latency serving (sub-200ms end-to-end): model distillation, quantization, pruning, caching, streaming inference, and custom CUDA/Triton kernels where needed.
• Build and maintain the training, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure on GPU clusters (PyTorch, DeepSpeed, FSDP, Ray, Kubernetes).
• Define and track quality metrics — lip-sync accuracy, identity preservation, expression naturalness, latency, and throughput — and drive measurable improvements.
• Collaborate closely with backend, product, and research teams to ship avatar features into production and iterate rapidly based on real user feedback.
• Stay current with the latest research in generative video, multimodal AI, and neural rendering, and bring novel techniques into our stack.

What We're Looking For
• 3+ years of hands-on ML engineering experience (or strong research experience with production-quality code), with a track record of shipping deep learning models.
• Deep expertise in PyTorch and modern deep learning workflows; comfortable reading, reproducing, and extending research papers.
• Strong background in one or more of: diffusion models, video generation, generative AI, computer vision, multimodal AI (audio + vision), speech synthesis, or neural rendering.
• Experience with talking-head / audio-driven animation / lip-sync / digital human systems, or closely related areas (3D Gaussian Splatting, NeRF, face reenactment, avatar synthesis) is a strong plus.
• Proven ability to optimize models for realtime inference — familiarity with TensorRT, ONNX, Triton Inference Server, CUDA, mixed-precision, and streaming pipelines.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals in Python; experience with distributed training on multi-GPU / multi-node setups.
• Comfortable working in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments, with a proactive, ownership-driven mindset.
• Fast learner with a startup mentality, eager to push the frontier of what interactive AI avatars can do.
• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, ICLR, ICML) or notable open-source contributions are a plus.

Compensation: $160,000 - $200,000 per year (base salary), plus stock options. H1B transfer available.

APN Job ID: 167725

About Us
IntelliPro Group Inc. is a global staffing and talent solutions company. We connect exceptional professionals with leading organizations across technology, engineering, and professional services. By partnering closely with both clients and candidates, we build long-term relationships that help businesses grow and careers thrive.