--- title: 'Business Operations Associate at Nuance Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-associate-nuance-labs-seattle-4ht6ds9z4b5d' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Business Operations Associate at Nuance Labs - **Company:** Nuance Labs - **Location:** Seattle, WA - **Posted:** 2026-10-21 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs/jobs/4462754009 ## Job description ## 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 We’re looking for a Business Operations Associate to help Nuance Labs run smoothly day-to-day and build the foundation for the next stage of growth. You’ll own our day-to-day finance operations, from expense tracking and vendor payments to month-end close. Beyond finance, you’ll take on cross-functional and special projects across the company. This is a hands-on role with an emphasis on reliable finance execution and practical problem-solving wherever the business needs it most. ## What You’ll Own - Day-to-day finance, including expense tracking, month-end close with our external accountant, and finding ways to make our spend smarter. - Cross-functional projects from start to finish. - Internal communication systems that keep the team aligned as we scale. - New processes and systems built from scratch as the company grows. ## What We’re Looking For - Bring 1–4 years of experience in finance, consulting, or startup operations, with a proven ability to tackle unstructured problems and deliver results. - Care deeply about building teams and shaping a positive and high-performing culture. - Are resourceful in navigating finance, HR, and other processes — able to build order where none exists. - Can partner closely with the team to turn vague needs (and sometimes half-baked ideas) into structured processes, anticipating problems and solutions before they’re spelled out. - Enjoy wearing multiple hats and thrive in a small, ambitious, high-trust team. ## Compensation $90,000-$135,000 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. - Culture: Quarterly events, annual retreat, holiday party, etc. - 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. ## About Nuance Labs ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Nuance Labs is building a real-time, full-duplex audiovisual AI model that can see, hear, reason, speak, and express emotion simultaneously, enabling face-to-face interaction with machines. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; raised $10M in a seed round led by Accel) - **Headquarters**: Seattle, Washington, United States - **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed (likely 2024 or 2025 based on funding date) - **Founders**: Fangchang Ma (CEO), Edward Zhang (CTO), Karren Yang (Chief Scientist) – all PhDs from MIT with prior experience at Apple ## Core Business - Primary industry: Artificial Intelligence / Software Development - Target customers: B2B (enterprise and consumer product integration) and potentially B2C (direct-to-consumer AI interfaces) - Mission or purpose statement: “We are creating a world where people can finally talk to every product, face to face.” – building a “human foundation model” with social and emotional intelligence. ## Products & Services - **The Full-Duplex Engine**: A real-time audiovisual model that perceives, reasons, and responds within 500ms – handling interjections, nodding, backchanneling, tone, and expression. The system is designed to cross the uncanny valley with warm, engaging personality. - **Human Foundation Model**: An AI that learns human behavior by predicting the next audio and visual token (similar to how transformers predict the next word). It reads tone, expression, hesitation, and responds in real time. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding – $10M in a seed round closed on October 9, 2025 - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investor Accel (with 3 total investors in the seed round) - **Growth Signals**: - Small team of ~10 employees with 9.1% monthly headcount growth - Strong hiring momentum: 6+ active job postings for research and engineering roles - Team includes PhDs from MIT, UW, Oxford, CMU, Johns Hopkins, and alumni from Apple, Meta, Amazon AGI, and Discord - High LinkedIn follower growth (+4.5% monthly) ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-duplex real-time capability**: 500ms latency floor – a hard requirement for natural conversation that most current AI systems cannot achieve. - **Multimodal emotional intelligence**: Reads tone, expression, and hesitation, not just text. - **Elite founding team**: PhDs from top institutions with deep experience shipping ultra-low-latency ML products at Apple and other tech giants. - **First-mover in “human foundation model”**: Applying next-token prediction to audio-visual human behavior, not just language. ## Strategic Focus - Current priorities: Advance the Full-Duplex Engine, scale the model, and build the infrastructure for real-time audiovisual interaction. The company is hiring across pretraining infrastructure, RL research, model optimization, speech synthesis, video diffusion, and MLLM training. - Long-term direction: Enable face-to-face AI interaction for every product, moving computing interfaces closer to human communication. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: “Small, fast-moving research team” with an “exceedingly high bar” – only the very best talent. Every member has massive ownership, deep trust, and the opportunity to shape both the technology and the company from the ground up. - **Location**: Based in Seattle, WA. The company appears to be primarily in-office (all listed roles are in Seattle, and the team is small). - **Notable perks**: Not explicitly mentioned, but the emphasis on research autonomy, high-impact work, and a founding team from top AI labs suggests a strong engineering culture with cutting-edge projects. - **Open roles** (as of mid-2026): Research Scientist (Speech Synthesis, Video Diffusion, MLLM Training), Machine Learning Research Engineer, ML Infra Engineer, Systems Engineer (Real-Time Engine), AI Product Engineer, and more. ## Sources 1. [nuancelabs.ai](https://www.nuancelabs.ai/) 2. [nuancelabs.ai/careers](https://www.nuancelabs.ai/careers) 3. [nuancelabs.ai/about](https://www.nuancelabs.ai/about) 4. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs) 5. 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