Nuance Research Fellow

Summary

Nuance Labs is building innovative AI technologies, focusing on photorealistic and real-time AI avatars. The Nuance Research Fellowship offers early-career researchers the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge research in Multimodal LLMs and generative modeling, with the potential for a full-time position at the conclusion of the fellowship.

Responsibilities

• Own a concrete research problem from framing through experiments, analysis, and integration into the Nuance stack
• Work on frontier Multimodal LLM systems spanning audio, video, language, and real-time interaction
• Explore and adapt modern generative modeling techniques, including flow matching, diffusion, autoregressive modeling, and hybrid approaches where they fit
• Read papers, reproduce key results, and turn promising ideas into production-grade experiments
• Design, instrument, debug, and interpret training and evaluation runs with scientific rigor
• Build evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, and analysis tooling for real-time conversational agents
• Take research-grade prototypes and turn them into systems that ship
• Work closely with senior researchers and engineers across the team; ramp on the stack fast

Skills

• Strong working knowledge of PyTorch and deep learning — you can train a model, debug a training run, and reason about what's happening at the loss level
• At least one first-author paper at a tier 1 venue (main conference proceedings) — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICASSP, Interspeech, MLSys, SIGGRAPH, or equivalent — or equivalent evidence of unusually strong research taste and execution
• Genuine interest in joining Nuance full-time after the fellowship. We are looking for long-term partners on this journey
• Currently enrolled in or recently completed a BS, MS, or PhD in CS, ML, math, physics, EE, or a related field
• Strong programming ability and software engineering instincts
• High agency — when you see something broken or slow, you fix it; when you see an opportunity, you take it before being asked
• A bias toward shipping over polishing, with the judgment to know when each matters
• The appetite to pick up anything and optimize the hell out of it

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Strong working knowledge of PyTorch and deep learning — you can train a model, debug a training run, and reason about what's happening at the loss level
• At least one first-author paper at a tier 1 venue (main conference proceedings) — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICASSP, Interspeech, MLSys, SIGGRAPH, or equivalent — or equivalent evidence of unusually strong research taste and execution
• Genuine interest in joining Nuance full-time after the fellowship. We are looking for long-term partners on this journey

Nice to Haves

• Currently enrolled in or recently completed a BS, MS, or PhD in CS, ML, math, physics, EE, or a related field
• Strong programming ability and software engineering instincts
• High agency — when you see something broken or slow, you fix it; when you see an opportunity, you take it before being asked
• A bias toward shipping over polishing, with the judgment to know when each matters
• The appetite to pick up anything and optimize the hell out of it

Benefits

• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas (O-1, H-1B, green card) from day one.
• HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions — roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
• 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
• Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday — the small thing that quietly makes the day better.
• We help cover the cost of getting to the office.
• In the works.