Research Scientist, Low Level Vision, Level 4

Snap Inc is a technology company. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Snap contributes to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. The Company’s three core products are Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world; Lens Studio, an augmented reality platform that powers AR across Snapchat and other services; and its AR glasses, Spectacles.

Job Description

Snap Inc is a technology company. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Snap contributes to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. The Company’s three core products are Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world; Lens Studio, an augmented reality platform that powers AR across Snapchat and other services; and its AR glasses, Spectacles.

Snap Research serves as an innovation engine for the company. Our projects range from solutions to hard technical problems that significantly enhance Snap’s existing products, to riskier explorations that can lead to fundamental paradigm shifts in the way people communicate and express themselves. The team consists of scientists and engineers who experiment with and invent new technology that has a lasting impact on Snap’s products. 

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.

What you'll do:

• 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
   

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities:

• 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-