Product Manager, Interactive Avatar API (Staff/Principal-level)
Synthesia
- Location
- Seattle
- Employment
- Full Time
- Work model
- On-Site
- Level
- Principal
- Posted
- 2h ago
Skills
About this role
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