Member of Technical Staff Model Optimization and Inference

Company: Nuance Labs
Location: Seattle WA (in office 5 days per week; relocation assistance available)
Compensation: $250000 - $350000 equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa sponsorship available

Nuance Labs builds photorealistic real-time AI avatars with emotional intelligence: a full-duplex audiovisual system that can listen speak react and respond like a real person. The research team includes PhDs from MIT UW Oxford CMU and Johns Hopkins.

Founded in 2024 Nuance Labs has raised $60M and has about 25 people.

Nuance Labs is hiring an experienced ML Infrastructure/Systems Engineer (2 years) to own end-to-end inference optimization across LLMs audio models and diffusion components with a focus on latency throughput and cost.

• Own end-to-end inference optimization across the model stack.
• Implement and tune KV cache strategies for long-context conversations.
• Evaluate deploy and extend serving frameworks such as vLLM SGLang and TensorRT-LLM.
• Profile and benchmark latency and throughput and remove bottlenecks.
• Accelerate diffusion inference and apply quantization techniques (INT8 INT4 GPTQ AWQ).
• Build internal tooling that makes optimization work faster and more rigorous.

• 2 years building and maintaining production ML systems
• Designing scalable infrastructure from scratch
• Track record optimizing latency throughput and cost
• Debugging distributed systems

• Video or audio model experience
• CUDA kernels and low-level optimization
• Real-time video streaming (WebRTC)

HSA with about $2000 annual company contribution 15 days PTO plus public holidays and a company-wide office closure week.

Kubernetes Terraform Python Rust Go Dagster Ray Airflow WebRTC vLLM Triton Inference Server TensorRT

REVENUE: 15.74% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $39K-$55K; 7 seat(s) up to $331K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): NVIDIA Together AI Fireworks AI Groq ElevenLabs Deepgram Meta (FAIR/GenAI).

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 2 (experienced) yrs; production ML inference systems; latency/throughput optimization; distributed systems debugging; visa: sponsorship available; location: Seattle 5 days. Low competition.