What we're looking for?
We’re looking for someone who’s excited about taking trained models and squeezing every last millisecond out of them. You understand — or want to deeply understand — the full stack from model weights to serving infrastructure: quantization, KV cache optimization, kernel-level acceleration, batching strategies. You’ve worked with vLLM, SGLang, or similar frameworks (through coursework, research, internships, or open-source) and have opinions about where they fall short.
We're aiming for early-career engineers finishing or recently finished with a BS, MS, or PhD. We don’t require a PhD — we care about systems intuition, engineering chops, and the appetite to go deep.
What you'll do:
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 Discord. 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.
Salary
$200,000 - $300,000
Location
Seattle, United States
Experience
0+ years
Total raised
$60.0M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.