--- title: 'Nuance Research Fellow at Nuance Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/nuance-research-fellow-nuance-labs-seattle-hge7hy4qpd3t' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Nuance Research Fellow at Nuance Labs - **Company:** Nuance Labs - **Location:** Seattle, WA - **Posted:** 2026-06-11 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs/jobs/4283950009 ## 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 The Nuance Research Fellowship is a 3-month engagement for early-career researchers who want to work at the frontier of Multimodal LLMs, generative modeling, and real-time audiovisual AI. The program is open to current PhD students (on internship, leave, or in their final stretch) and recent graduates from BS, MS, or PhD programs. As a fellow, you’ll own a real research problem inside one of our core workstreams: pretraining, post-training, RL, evaluation, data, multimodal modeling, generative modeling, or inference. Depending on your strengths, this could mean training omni models from scratch, improving real-time audio-video-language reasoning, building evals for full-duplex interaction, or exploring model families such as flow matching and diffusion for controllable, high-fidelity generation. This is designed as a mutual trial for a long-term role at Nuance, not a short standalone internship. At the end of three months, we’ll decide together whether to convert to a full-time Member of Technical Staff role. Fellows who convert step into MTS-level scope and ownership from day one. ## What You’ll Own - Own a concrete research problem from framing through experiments, analysis, and integration into the Nuance stack - Work on frontier Multimodal LLM systems spanning audio, video, language, and real-time interaction - Explore and adapt modern generative modeling techniques, including flow matching, diffusion, autoregressive modeling, and hybrid approaches where they fit - Read papers, reproduce key results, and turn promising ideas into production-grade experiments - Design, instrument, debug, and interpret training and evaluation runs with scientific rigor - Build evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, and analysis tooling for real-time conversational agents - Take research-grade prototypes and turn them into systems that ship - Work closely with senior researchers and engineers across the team; ramp on the stack fast ## What We’re Looking For Hard requirements: - Strong working knowledge of PyTorch and deep learning — you can train a model, debug a training run, and reason about what’s happening at the loss level - At least one first-author paper at a tier 1 venue (main conference proceedings) — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICASSP, Interspeech, MLSys, SIGGRAPH, or equivalent — or equivalent evidence of unusually strong research taste and execution - Genuine interest in joining Nuance full-time after the fellowship. We are looking for long-term partners on this journey Beyond the hard bar: - Currently enrolled in or recently completed a BS, MS, or PhD in CS, ML, math, physics, EE, or a related field - Strong programming ability and software engineering instincts - High agency — when you see something broken or slow, you fix it; when you see an opportunity, you take it before being asked - A bias toward shipping over polishing, with the judgment to know when each matters - The appetite to pick up anything and optimize the hell out of it Bonus Points - Hands-on experience with Multimodal LLMs, omni models, audio-language models, video-language models, speech generation, or real-time interactive agents - Research or implementation experience with flow matching, diffusion models, rectified flows, autoregressive generation, neural codecs, or related generative modeling methods - Multiple tier 1 publications, or a paper that received significant attention (best paper award, broad adoption, high citation impact for its age) - Olympiad medals or finalist-level results in IMO, IPhO, IOI, IChO, IBO, IMC, or equivalent - Codeforces grandmaster, ICPC world finals, Putnam fellow, Kaggle grandmaster, or similar - Open-source contributions to major ML frameworks or research codebases - A track record of independent projects that made something noticeably faster, smaller, or better ## Compensation $200,000 – $250,000 annualized base salary during the 3-month fellowship (paid as a prorated stipend). Fellows who convert to a full-time Member of Technical Staff role step into a base salary of $250,000 – $350,000 plus meaningful equity. ## 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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