About the role
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. Backed by Accel, Lightspeed, South Park Commons, and NVIDIA, we combine frontier research with ruthless engineering needed for consumer-grade, real-time systems. 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
A great model is only part of the product. The rest is everything a person touches before, during, and after a conversation with our avatar, along with the tools our researchers rely on to make the next model better.
We’re looking for a Product Engineer who can own that surface end to end, from user-facing features and our developer platform to the internal tooling behind our research. You might spend one week on a feature for a launch and the next pairing with a researcher on tooling for an upcoming study.
There’s very little top-down direction here. Engineers find what needs doing, align with the people it affects, and get it done. This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who thrives on that kind of ownership.
What You’ll Own
- Build product features end to end, from backend systems through the UI, across the full conversation experience.
- Design experiences that stay fair and responsive when demand outstrips capacity, and make sure they hold up under heavy load.
- Build and grow our developer platform, including APIs, SDKs, and documentation that make it easy for other companies to build with our avatar.
- Maintain and improve our internal research tooling, and partner with researchers to design and build features that support their studies.
- Build ways for users to share feedback that helps us improve the product and our models.
- Make sure new versions of the avatar are tested before they reach users, roll out smoothly, and scale with demand.
- Work with cross-functional partners, including legal, on privacy-conscious user flows.
What We’re Looking For
- A track record of shipping product features end to end. You can walk us through what you built, the tradeoffs you made, and what happened after launch.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals in whatever languages you know best. We care more about how you think than which stack you’ve used.
- Proficient, everyday use of agentic AI tools, and the judgment to check their work.
- Product judgment. You care about how something feels to use, and you know where polish matters and where a quick version will answer the question.
- Comfort with production systems: load, rollouts, monitoring, and what to do when something breaks.
- Self-drive. Given a problem rather than a spec, you figure out what needs doing and follow through without daily direction.
- Range. You’re happy moving between product, platform, and research tooling, and you get up to speed quickly on whatever the next problem needs.
- Startup instincts. You thrive in small, fast-moving teams and enjoy owning outcomes rather than tickets.
Bonus Points
- Experience with conversational AI.
- Experience with audio/video capture or real-time media.
- Mobile and/or desktop app development.
- Experience building developer-facing products such as APIs, SDKs, or documentation.
- Experience building tools for researchers or working closely with ML teams.
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 & perks
- Health: We offer a variety of plans that meet your needs, including an HDHP with ~$2,000 in annual HSA contributions by the company (roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in).
- Wellness: $2,000/yr to spend on gym memberships, fitness equipment, training/coaching, classes, and more.
- Work setup: One-time $500 to spend on any tech or accessories that you might need to optimize your workflow.
- Time off: 15 days of PTO, 10 public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
- Food: Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday. We observe boba tea Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- Commuter benefits: Utilize pre-tax money (up to $340/month) for parking and transportation.
- 401(k): 4% match (100% of 1st 3% + 50% of next 2% contributions).
Nuance Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better AI.