Product engineer owning full-stack features for photorealistic AI avatars, including user-facing products, developer platform, and research tooling. Small team of researchers and engineers using real-time audio/video systems and foundation models.
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.
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.
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.
$250,000 – $300,000 base salary, plus meaningful equity. We think long-term ownership matters and structure equity accordingly.
Nuance Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better AI.