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
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.
What You’ll Own
- Build product features end to end, from backend systems through the UI, across the full conversation experience.
- Design experiences that stay fair and responsive when demand outstrips capacity, and make sure they hold up under heavy load.
- Build and grow our developer platform, including APIs, SDKs, and documentation that make it easy for other companies to build with our avatar.
- Maintain and improve our internal research tooling, and partner with researchers to design and build features that support their studies.
