Founding Technical Recruiter, AI Research & Engineering

Founding Technical Recruiter, AI Research & Engineering

Seattle, Washington

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 Discord. The team is small, the work is real, and the problems are unsolved.

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.

Hiring is one of the highest-leverage things happening at Nuance right now. We’re building a small, exceptional team to solve hard problems in real-time multimodal AI, and the people we hire over the next year will shape the company for years to come.

We’re looking for a Technical Recruiter to own full-cycle recruiting for AI research and engineering talent. You’ll source and close candidates who have real options: researchers from leading AI labs, exceptional new PhDs, ML systems engineers, and senior engineers who have shipped at serious scale.

This is not a role for someone looking to plug into a mature recruiting machine. You’ll work directly with the founders and the team to build the machine: sourcing strategy, candidate experience, interview process, closing motion, and the operating cadence that keeps hiring moving.

The right person is both strategic and hands‑on. You know how to find rare candidates, build trust before there is an open process, run tight interview loops, and close people on a company that is still early but deeply ambitious.

• Own full-cycle recruiting for AI research and engineering roles, from sourcing through close
• Build deep, high-signal pipelines across AI labs, research universities, startups, and frontier engineering teams
• Proactively source for hard-to-fill roles, including ML researchers, multimodal modeling specialists, ML systems engineers, infrastructure leads, and research fellows
• Develop genuine relationships with candidates long before they are actively interviewing
• Run fast, thoughtful, respectful interview processes that reflect the quality and seriousness of the team
• Partner with founders and hiring managers to calibrate role requirements, interview loops, scorecards, and hiring bars
• Drive debriefs, references, offer strategy, and close plans for high-priority candidates
• Help candidates understand Nuance’s technical ambition, stage, equity story, and long-term upside
• Build the recruiting operating layer over time, including ATS hygiene, sourcing systems, pipeline reporting, interview kits, and process improvements
• Raise the talent bar while keeping the process warm, human, and candidate-centered

Required

• Strong full-cycle technical recruiting experience in a high-bar environment, such as an AI lab, top-tier technology company, or fast-moving technical startup
• Demonstrated success hiring ML researchers, research scientists, ML engineers, infrastructure engineers, or similarly technical talent
• A track record of sourcing and closing candidates directly, not just coordinating an existing process
• Evidence of winning competitive candidates against larger companies, stronger brands, or higher-cash offers
• Excellent candidate judgment: you can quickly understand someone’s background, identify real signal, and separate substance from surface-level credentials
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to represent Nuance clearly and credibly to senior technical candidates
• High ownership, urgency, and…