Product Manager, Interactive Avatars (Staff/Principal-level)

Job description

Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow. ABOUT THE ROLE For years, avatars have been something you watch. You write a script, we render a video, someone presses play. That model has taken AI video a long way but it has a ceiling. A video can't answer a question. It can't read the room. It can't role-play a tough conversation and adapt when you push back. We're changing that. Interactive Avatars listen, talk, and respond in real time; inside your product, your website, or your internal tools. You bring the logic and the language model; we power the avatar layer: the speech, the expression, the listening, the sense that there's someone actually there. It's early. Interactive Avatars is in closed beta today, and the teams building on it are pushing it into places we didn't expect - AI sales reps, always-on support agents, interactive trainers, onboarding guides. We're hiring a Product Manager to own it and take it from beta to a platform that thousands of developers build on. This is a role with real scope. You'll help define what a real-time avatar API should be, the surface developers integrate against, the experience end users feel, and the commercial model that makes it a business. You'll work directly with the engineering and research teams building the real-time avatar stack, and with the design partners already live in the beta. THE PROBLEM YOU'RE SOLVING Today, a developer who wants a lifelike, real-time avatar in their product has to stitch together a streaming pipeline, a rendering layer, an agent, and a set of hard real-time problems - latency, interruption handling, listening behavior, expressiveness, consistency across sessions, most of which have nothing to do with the product they're actually trying to build. We have the avatar technology and a working beta. What we need is a PM who can turn that into an API a developer can integrate in an afternoon, trust in production, and build a real business on top of, all while holding a quality bar high enough that the experience feels human, not uncanny. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING - Owning the end-to-end Interactive Avatar API. This is the developer-facing surface (SDK, integration patterns, docs), the real-time experience quality, and the path from closed beta to general availability, and defining what the roadmap looks like over the coming cycles - Getting close to the developers and teams building on the beta: understanding how they integrate, where the API fights them, which real-time behaviors make or break the experience, and what "production-ready" means to them - Translating that understanding into a clear product direction. What to build, in what order, and why, and keeping the team aligned as the strategy evolves - Working closely with the engineering and research teams building the real-time avatar stack; contributing clear specs, sound judgment on trade-offs (quality vs. latency vs. cost), and the context that helps them build the right thing the first time - Partnering with go-to-market and commercial teams to define how the API is packaged, priced, and sold - a real-time API has a fundamentally different business model from batch video, and shaping that is part of the job - Defining and tracking the metrics that tell us whether the product is working across adoption, integration success, real-time quality, reliability, and the commercial signals that prove it's a business WHO YOU ARE You've owned a developer-facing product before like an API, an SDK, or a platform and you know that the product is the developer experience. You understand that adoption is won or lost in the first hour of integration, and that trust is won or lost the first time something breaks in production. You build accordingly. You're comfortable in a space where the roadmap isn't fully formed. You don't need a clean brief to get started. You can talk to developers, watch them integrate, synthesize what you see, and come back with a point of view. You're also honest about what you don't know and willing to update when the evidence changes. You care about the detail, and you can hold a quality bar for something subjective and hard: a real-time avatar either feels present and responsive or it feels off, and the difference lives in latency, interruption handling, expressiveness, and consistency. You know how to make that bar concrete and defend it. You think commercially. A new API isn't just a technical surface. It's a business, and you have instincts (or scar tissue) around how developer products get adopted, packaged, and monetized. REQUIREMENTS: - 5+ years in product, with direct experience owning a developer-facing API, SDK, or platform product. The vertical doesn't matter, the platform depth does - Comfortable operating in an early-stage, 0→1 environment where discovery and delivery happen in parallel and the roadmap is still being shaped - Strong technical fluency: you can hold a credible conversation with engineers about real-time systems, latency, and integration trade-offs, and make good calls without needing every answer handed to you - Strong written communication: you can write a spec, a strategy doc, or an API design rationale that others can act on without a follow-up conversation - Real-time / streaming media, conversational AI, or applied-AI product experience is a strong plus but not a prerequisite. - Instinct for the commercial side of a developer product - adoption, packaging, and monetization is a plus. - Based in Seattle or open to regular in-person time; the team is Seattle-anchored and that time matters OUR CULTURE At Synthesia we’re passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible. You can find out more about these principles here. https://www.notion.so/How-we-work-at-Synthesia-f794caa72f8446efb6be22b551ce0fa2?pvs=21 LOCATION Flexible, hybrid role based from our Seattle office. GLOBAL BENEFITS: - You will be compensated well with a generous salary and equity. - You get 25 days of annual leave + local holidays. - Regular team offsites where you’ll get to collaborate with the product & engineering team in person. - Work from home budget - Work from anywhere policy of 60 days per year - Generous referral scheme - Enhanced parental leave - maternity leave includes 16 weeks at full pay, and paternity leave includes 5 weeks at full pay (if your country’s government scheme offers more generous support, you receive whichever is greater—our enhanced policy or the local statutory benefit) BENEFITS SPECIFIC TO USA: - Medical Insurance - Vision and Dental Insurance - Mental Health Support - Flex Benefits (FSA’s, HSA’s, and Commuter) - 401k - Life Insurance.