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 Series A company ($60M raised) backed by Lightspeed, Accel, South Park Commons, NVentures, and Define Ventures, 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.
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
What you'll own
- Our physical environment: own relationships with building and facilities management, and ensuring the space evolves with us as we grow. You'll decide what a great in-person experience looks like here and make it happen
- Our expense management muscle: support expense tracking, own month-end close with our external accountant, and proactively find ways to make our spend smarter. You'll have real visibility into the company's financial operations from day one
- How information flows: design and maintain the internal communications systems that keep a fast-moving team aligned
- How we bring in people: build an on-site interview experience and onboarding experience that sets up every candidate and every new-hire to perform their best
- How we come together: design the moments (e.g., team lunches, offsites, celebrations) that define our culture. At this stage, you have real influence over what kind of company we become
- Who we work with: manage our vendor and contract landscape, and proactively identify new partners and tools that unlock the next stage of growth. You're not just maintaining relationships--you're building them
Illustrative projects
- Office redesign: partner with a designer and contractor team to reimagine our space for collaboration and productivity in an aesthetic that conveys our brand
- IT support procurement: identify IT vendors that can help us scale our operations
- Annual team holiday party: own the full arc of our year-end celebration, from venue selection and vendor coordination to the agenda and details that make it feel like
Logistics: In-person in Seattle, 5 days a week — we believe in the compounding value of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
Nuance Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better AI.