Member of Technical Staff — Model Optimization and Inference

About the Company

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 are a research company composed of PhDs from top institutions and industry veterans from Apple, Meta, and Amazon AGI.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end inference optimization across LLMs, audio models, and diffusion-based components
• Implement and tune KV cache strategies for long-context conversations
• Evaluate, deploy, and extend inference serving frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM
• Profile and benchmark end-to-end latency and throughput to eliminate bottlenecks
• Build internal profiling and testing infrastructure
• Accelerate diffusion model inference through distillation and custom kernel optimizations
• Apply quantization techniques (INT8, INT4, GPTQ, AWQ) to reduce memory footprint
• Partner with research and infrastructure teams to ensure optimized model shipping

Requirements

• Significant experience with LLM inference optimization (KV caching, memory layout, attention kernels)
• Proficiency with inference serving frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM)
• Experience optimizing diffusion model inference
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills
• Systematic approach to profiling and benchmarking
• Familiarity with speculative decoding or other acceleration techniques

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with post-training quantization (GPTQ, AWQ)
• Familiarity with multimodal or streaming inference architectures
• Experience deploying real-time AI systems with hard latency SLAs
• Prior work at an AI lab or high-traffic model serving platform
• Contributions to open-source inference frameworks
• Ability to read and write CUDA or Triton kernels

Benefits

• $250,000 – $350,000 base salary plus meaningful equity
• HSA plan with ~$2,000 annual company contribution
• 15 days PTO plus public holidays and a full week off at year-end
• Daily lunch, drinks, and snacks
• Commuter benefits
• Visa sponsorship available (O-1, H-1B, green card)