Nuancelabs

Nuance Research Fellow

Seattle, Washington · Staff+ · Internship

H1B sponsorship available$200k-$250kDetected 40 days ago

ReactMachine LearningDeep LearningPyTorchLLMsLogisticsHRISResearch

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.
At the end of three months, we'll decide together whether to convert to a full-time Member of Technical Staff role.

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.
Own a concrete research problem from framing through experiments, analysis, and integration into the Nuance stack
Design, instrument, debug, and interpret training and evaluation runs with scientific rigor
Build evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, and analysis tooling for real-time conversational agents
We believe diverse teams build better AI.
The appetite to pick up anything and optimize the hell out of it

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
A track record of independent projects that made something noticeably faster, smaller, or better

$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.

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.

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