--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff — Product Engineer at Nuance Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-product-engineer-nuance-labs-seattle-zm9x57wq3hhx' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Member of Technical Staff — Product Engineer at Nuance Labs - **Company:** Nuance Labs - **Location:** Seattle, WA - **Posted:** 2026-10-28 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs/jobs/4470870009 ## 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 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. ## 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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