Nuancelabs

Founding Technical Recruiter, AI Research & Engineering

Seattle, Washington · Exec

H1B sponsorship available$200k-$300kDetected 40 days ago

ReactMachine LearningLogisticsRecruitingHRISCadenceResearchCommunication

About the role

Hiring is one of the highest-leverage things happening at Nuance right now.
You'll source and close candidates who have real options: researchers from leading AI labs, exceptional new PhDs, ML systems engineers, and senior engineers who have shipped at serious scale.
This is not a role for someone looking to plug into a mature recruiting machine.

Own full-cycle recruiting for AI research and engineering roles, from sourcing through close
Build deep, high-signal pipelines across AI labs, research universities, startups, and frontier engineering teams
Develop genuine relationships with candidates long before they are actively interviewing
Partner with founders and hiring managers to calibrate role requirements, interview loops, scorecards, and hiring bars
Drive debriefs, references, offer strategy, and close plans for high-priority candidates
Build the recruiting operating layer over time, including ATS hygiene, sourcing systems, pipeline reporting, interview kits, and process improvements
We believe diverse teams build better AI.
You are energized by building the recruiting function itself, not just filling requisitions.

Strong full-cycle technical recruiting experience in a high-bar environment, such as an AI lab, top-tier technology company, or fast-moving technical startup
A track record of sourcing and closing candidates directly, not just coordinating an existing process
Excellent candidate judgment: you can quickly understand someone's background, identify real signal, and separate substance from surface-level credentials
Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to represent Nuance clearly and credibly to senior technical candidates
You are warm, curious, and genuinely interested in people.
You have strong closing instincts.
You care about process, but you are not process-bound.
You know when a tool helps, when a spreadsheet is enough, and when the right answer is to pick up the phone.
Prior in-house recruiting experience at a frontier AI lab, AI startup, or highly selective engineering organization
Experience hiring PhDs, research scientists, or candidates coming out of top academic programs

Health: HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions - roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
Time off: 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
Commuter benefits: We help cover the cost of getting to the office.

About Nuance Labs
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 Discord.
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.
Proactively source for hard-to-fill roles, including ML researchers, multimodal modeling specialists, ML systems engineers, infrastructure leads, and research fellows
Run fast, thoughtful, respectful interview processes that reflect the quality and seriousness of the team

This listing is sourced directly from Nuancelabs's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.