Member of Technical Staff — ML Infra (Data)

Nuance Labs · Seattle, Washington

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About Nuance Labs

Nuance Labs is building photorealistic, real-time AI avatars with emotional intelligence: a full-duplex audiovisual system that can listen, speak, react, interrupt, and respond like a real person.

We're a research company, with PhDs from MIT, UW, Oxford, CMU, and Johns Hopkins, and industry experience from Apple, Meta, Amazon AGI, and more. The team is small, the work is real, and the problems are unsolved.

How Nuance Differentiates

Most conversational AI avatars today are hacks — a face slapped on a speech-to-speech pipeline, stuck in the uncanny valley: emotionless, mechanical, one-turn-at-a-time. Current systems take 2–5 seconds to respond; natural conversation requires sub-500ms. That's a 10x improvement, and it demands rethinking the entire stack.

That rethinking starts with full-duplex: an AI that listens and speaks simultaneously, perceives emotion in real time, and responds with a face that actually reflects it. It's an extremely hard problem, and we're developing foundation models designed for it from the ground up.

About the Role

Model quality is ultimately a data problem. The best architecture and the best training run can't outrun bad, slow, or poorly curated data — and at the scale we're operating, the difference between a good data pipeline and a great one shows up directly in the model.

We're looking for someone who lives and breathes data at scale. You know how to build pipelines that are fast, reliable, and maintainable — and you're just as comfortable taking a researcher's messy processing script and turning it into something that runs on petabytes as you are designing a new pipeline architecture from scratch. Research moves fast here, and the ability to productionize quickly without losing fidelity is the core skill.

Our data is multimodal — video, audio, and text — and the processing requirements are demanding: high throughput, low error rates, and strict quality filters. There's a lot of interesting engineering work here, and the impact is direct and measurable.

What You'll Do

What We're Looking For

Bonus Points

Compensation

$200,000 – $300,000 base salary, plus meaningful equity. We think long-term ownership matters and structure equity accordingly.

Logistics

  • Location: In-person in Seattle, five days a week — we believe in the compounding value of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
  • Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas (O-1, H-1B, green card, etc.) from day one.
  • AI-native tooling: Do your best work with the best tools, including unlimited tokens.

Benefits

  • Health: HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions — roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
  • Time off: 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
  • Food: Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday — the small thing that quietly makes the day better.
  • Commuter benefits: We help cover the cost of getting to the office.
  • 401(k)

 

Nuance Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better AI.

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