Member of Technical Staff — Model Optimization and Inference (New Grad)
Nuance Labs, Seattle, Washington +1
The role
We can train a great model. The next problem is making it fast enough to actually use in a real-time conversation — and that gap is enormous. A model that responds in 3 seconds is a demo. A model that responds in under 500ms is a product.
We’re looking for someone who’s excited about taking trained models and squeezing every last millisecond out of them. You understand — or want to deeply understand — the full stack from model weights to serving infrastructure: quantization, KV cache optimization, kernel-level acceleration, batching strategies. You’ve worked with vLLM, SGLang, or similar frameworks (through coursework, research, internships, or open-source) and have opinions about where they fall short.
This posting is aimed at early-career engineers finishing or recently finished with a BS, MS, or PhD. We don’t require a PhD — we care about systems intuition, engineering chops, and the appetite to go deep.
Our stack is more complex than a standard LLM deployment: we’re serving a full-duplex multimodal system that must satisfy strict real-time latency constraints. There’s a lot of unsolved optimization work here, and we want someone who finds that genuinely exciting and is ready to grow fast alongside people who’ve built these systems before.