--- title: 'Senior Corporate Counsel — Commercial & AI Data at Nuance Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-corporate-counsel-commercial-ai-data-nuance-labs-seattle-9awznnhtae2n' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Senior Corporate Counsel — Commercial & AI Data at Nuance Labs - **Company:** Nuance Labs - **Location:** Seattle, WA - **Posted:** 2026-09-29 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs/jobs/4425082009 ## 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 Senior Corporate Counsel to help Nuance Labs move quickly on day-to-day deals and navigate the evolving AI data and privacy landscape. As our first in-house attorney, you'll work closely with our business, research, and data teams, alongside our external legal counsel team, to negotiate agreements and resolve practical legal questions. Our work in real-time audio-visual AI raises questions around data sourcing, usage rights, consent, and privacy. You'll help translate those questions into clear advice and workable agreements that support research and product development. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with an emphasis on day-to-day deal execution and practical guidance on AI data and privacy. ## What You’ll Own - Draft, negotiate, and close day-to-day commercial agreements, including data collection and licensing agreements, vendor and customer contracts, NDAs, and partnership agreements. - Manage the contract workflow from intake through signature, keeping deals moving and helping teams make informed decisions. - Partner with research and data teams on the rights, permissions, and restrictions associated with sourcing and using data for AI training, evaluation, and product development. - Advise on privacy and data protection issues involving audio, video, and other personal data, including consent, data processing terms, retention, and deletion, in partnership with our external legal counsel team. - Track relevant developments in AI, data rights, and privacy, and translate them into practical guidance for our data practices and product decisions. - Develop and maintain contract templates, negotiation playbooks, and lightweight review processes. - Provide occasional support on routine employment, IP, and office lease matters in coordination with external counsel, with commercial transactions and AI data/privacy remaining the primary focus. ## What We’re Looking For - At least 3 years of experience in commercial or technology transactions, ideally with a mix of law firm and in-house experience. - Strong drafting and negotiation skills, with a track record of independently managing multiple deals from start to finish. - Practical experience with privacy and data protection, including data processing agreements and consent requirements. - Experience with data licensing, data acquisition, or AI-related legal issues. - Sound judgment in ambiguous situations and the ability to give clear, actionable legal guidance. - A hands-on approach and enthusiasm for day-to-day execution in a fast-moving research and technology company. - Ability to recognize when specialist advice is needed and work effectively with external legal counsel. - JD from an accredited law school and active bar membership. Bonus Points - Familiarity with audio, video, or biometric data and the associated privacy and consent considerations. - Experience supporting AI or machine learning teams on training data rights and related agreements. - Experience at an early-stage technology company, including building practical contracting processes and templates. ## 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. [linkedin.com/company/nuance-labs-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nuance-labs-ai) ## Other roles at Nuance Labs - [Member of Technical Staff — Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-product-engineer-nuance-labs-seattle-zm9x57wq3hhx) — Seattle, WA - [Business Operations Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-associate-nuance-labs-seattle-4ht6ds9z4b5d) — Seattle, WA - [Performance Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/performance-marketer-nuance-labs-seattle-6f2krx9tqnwa) — Seattle, WA - [Member of Technical Staff — Model Optimization and Inference (New Grad)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-model-optimization-and-inference-new-grad-nuance-labs-ech27rtf16gn) — Seattle, WA - [Member of Technical Staff — Model Optimization and Inference (Experienced)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-model-optimization-and-inference-experienced-nuance-5gazzjwgrhm1) — Seattle, WA