Lead Engineer, Interactive Avatar

About HeyGen

At HeyGen, our mission is to make visual storytelling accessible to all. Over the last decade, visual content has become the preferred method of information creation, consumption, and retention. But the ability to create such content, in particular videos, continues to be costly and challenging to scale. Our ambition is to build technology that equips more people with the power to reach, captivate, and inspire audiences.
Learn more at www.heygen.com.  Visit our Mission and Culture doc here. 

The opportunity

We’re seeking an experienced and passionate Engineering Leader to own and scale our Interactive Avatar product—a cutting-edge offering that enables real-time, AI-powered avatars for various use cases via API, including customer engagement, onboarding, and more.on.

As the Engineering Leader, you will spearhead architecture and product engineering for Interactive Avatar, working directly with founders, designers, researchers, and a world-class ML team to deliver a seamless user experience powered by the latest in LLM and multimodal AI technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and scale a team of software engineers building HeyGen’s Interactive Avatar platform.
• Drive end-to-end development—from backend architecture, latency optimization, and streaming infrastructure to tooling and frontend delivery.
• Collaborate with product and design to translate user needs into fast, intelligent, and responsive avatar platform.
• Own the reliability and scalability of real-time avatar performance across API, web and mobile surfaces.
• Work closely with infra teams to integrate state-of-the-art speech, language, and video generation models.
• Foster a strong engineering culture emphasizing velocity, ownership, and innovation.
• Establish technical direction, conduct design reviews, and mentor engineers across the org.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership capacity.
• Proven experience building and scaling real-time interactive systems, such as voice / video chat, live customer support, or virtual agents.
• Strong background in full-stack development (Node.js, Python, React) and experience with real-time media (WebRTC, streaming, low-latency APIs).
• Familiarity with deploying models in production—particularly those related to speech, vision, or conversational AI.
• Strong communication and organizational skills; able to work fluidly with cross-functional teams.
• Experience working in fast-paced startup environments with distributed teams.

Bonus

• Prior experience with avatars, virtual assistants, or generative media.
• Exposure to LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini) and prompt orchestration pipelines.
• Startup founder or early-stage builder mindset, hungry for winning.

Why Join Us?

• Be part of one of the fastest-growing companies at the intersection of AI and media.
• Work with a team of world-class researchers, engineers, and creatives.
• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.

Base Salary Range
$250,000 – 300,000 annually
Please note that the salary information is a general guideline only.  HeyGen considers factors such as scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education/training, key skills, and internal equity, as well as location, market and business considerations when extending an offer.  As part of our total rewards package, HeyGen offers comprehensive benefits including a 401k plan, health benefits, generous PTO, a parental leave program and emotional health resources.

HeyGen is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Join us at HeyGen and be part of a team that's reshaping the world of video creation through innovative technology!