Synthesia is one of the hottest AI startups in Europe right now.
In January, the UK-based company — which uses generative AI to create realistic avatars of people for marketing videos and communications — raised $180m at a $2.1bn valuation, cementing its position as an industry frontrunner.
A few months later, Synthesia announced it had hit $100m in annual recurring revenue and was plotting a push into the AI agent market in 2025.
All that progress has seen the company make big moves on the recruitment front. Synthesia’s headcount has grown from 363 at the start of the year to 550 today.
The startup courted London Mayor Sadiq Khan and UK tech minister Peter Kyle to the grand opening of a new 20k square feet office in central London — four times the size of its previous home.
That space will continue to fill up. The company says it’s continuing to grow teams across R&D, engineering, sales, customer support and operations.
Sifted speaks to Synthesia’s head of technical talent acquisition Jonathan Durnford-Smith to find out what the startup is looking for in candidates to those roles.
What kinds of qualifications do you look for in potential candidates?
For engineering, we look for computer science or similar backgrounds, though we don’t tend to index too heavily on universities or courses.
While a degree from a good university can be a useful signal, we tend to hire more experienced engineers and are more concerned with what they have worked on, the impact they have had in previous roles and their ability to take ownership over their work.
For R&D, we would usually look for an MSc or PhD, with specific knowledge in computer vision, diffusion, generative adversarial networks (GANs) and multimodal approaches.
We don’t index heavily on specific universities but instead look for a relevant MSc or PhD coupled with some applied research work where they have applied novel techniques to a product with a real end user.
For both departments, candidates will be considered even if they don’t have top grades at university. We can be flexible depending on the person’s previous experience and ability to communicate the impact they have had in their previous roles or academic research.
What’s the job interview process like?
Our process involves an interview with a technical recruiter, an interview with a research engineering manager and two technical assessments to understand how the candidate approaches a problem and communicates potential solutions and challenges. There are four rounds in total.
For engineering, we give a take home task and systems design style interviews. We try to make our process as close to the day-to-day of the role as possible.
For R&D, we send a take home task relevant to our work, followed by a technical debrief where we dig deeper into their reasoning, what they did and why they did it. Again, we try to make our process as close to the day-to-day as possible.
There are no books or courses we’d recommend candidates take ahead of an interview. We are more concerned with impact through applied work. We don’t believe you should need to revise a textbook to pass an interview.
What are the first few months like for a new hire?
For engineering, we try to get people up to speed as quickly as possible with our codebase and products. We work at pace and give people sizable ownership over things end-to-end.
This approach isn’t for everyone and often favours user-aware engineers looking to create genuine value through their work.
For R&D, we get people up to speed as quickly as possible with our codebase, products and roadmap.
We then have them work closely with their immediate team to understand what is being worked on over the course of that quarter and the next. We expect people to be proactive, ask lots of questions and be curious with a willingness to throw themselves into solving problems within the first few weeks.
We’ll allocate projects based on our roadmaps and areas where we want to accelerate development.
Internal training and mentoring is done in collaboration with line managers and fellow team members but we are looking into developing a more formal mentorship or buddy system to allow for more support while people get up to speed.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/how-to-get-a-job-at-synthesia-this-approach-isnt-for-everyone/
