Chief of Staff

About Nuance Labs

Nuance Labs is an early-stage deep tech startup. We’re building the first real-time human foundation model — unifying text, speech, and vision — to make AI socially and emotionally intelligent. Imagine an AI that can understand a quirked eyebrow, a shift in tone, or a hesitant pause, and respond in a way that feels truly human.

Key Facts

This is for you, if

  • Bring 2–4 years of experience in management consulting, strategy, or operations, with a proven ability to tackle unstructured problems and deliver results.

  • Are resourceful in navigating legal, HR, financial, and other processes — able to build order where none exists.

  • Can partner closely with founders and the team to turn vague needs (and sometimes half-baked ideas) into structured processes, anticipating problems and solutions before they’re spelled out.

  • Move with urgency and a bias for execution, while keeping an eye on detail and quality.

  • Communicate with clarity and professionalism across internal and external stakeholders.

  • Care deeply about building and managing teams, from recruiting top talent to shaping a positive and high-performing culture.

  • Enjoy wearing multiple hats and thrive in a small, ambitious, high-trust team.

Core responsibilities

Why this team

Cultural Values

How to Apply

Seattle, WA

We’re former Apple research scientists who’ve spent years advancing AI avatar and audio-visual generation — publishing at top conferences and shipping ultra-low-latency ML products to millions. We combine frontier research with the ruthless engineering needed for consumer-grade, real-time systems.


Fangchang Ma: CEO. MIT PhD in Robotics and ML. Previously Research Manager at Apple, with experience at DJI. Published in top AI conferences with 2400+ citations.

Edward Zhang: CTO. UW PhD in Computer Graphics. Previously Senior research scientist at Apple, with experience at Google, Microsoft.

Karren Yang: Founding Research Scientist. MIT PhD. Previously senior research scientist at Apple, with experience at Niantic Labs, Meta Reality Labs, Bosch Center for AI, and Adobe Research. Published in top AI conferences with 1800+ citations.

Claudia Vanea: Research Fellow. Oxford PhD in AI. Previously founder at South Park Commons. Developed first AI computational framework in her field with performance surpassing domain experts. Published in top AI conferences and scientific journals.


We’re a small, fast-moving research team with an exceedingly high bar — bringing on only the very best talent. Every member has massive ownership, deep trust, and the opportunity to shape both the technology and the company from the ground up.

$10M seed round backed by Accel, South Park Commons, Lightspeed, and angel investors including the former Chief Product Officer of Synthesia.

In-person collaboration, 5 days a week, Seattle HQ (with plan to expand to San Francisco)

  • Doing right by people — integrity and respect aren’t negotiable.

  • Transparency — we communicate openly and share context so everyone can make informed decisions.

  • Relentless speed — we bias toward action, iterate fast, and learn quickly.

  • In-person collaboration: the best ideas and strongest teams happen face-to-face. Being together fuels our energy, accelerates problem-solving, and sparks creativity.

Email careers@nuancelabs.ai with your CV and a short note on why this role excites you.

  • Operations: Oversee legal, HR, finance, and accounting processes, ensuring compliance, accuracy, and timeliness.

  • Recruiting: Build and manage pipelines for top AI researchers and engineers, coordinating outreach, scheduling, and candidate experience end-to-end.

  • Strategy: Track product development and research progress, gather customer insights, and help shape product and research strategy.

  • External communication: Prepare investor updates, board materials, and presentations; manage relationships with advisors, partners, and vendors.

  • Finance & metrics: Own budget tracking, financial forecasting, and company dashboards (burn, hiring funnel, product milestones).

  • Project management: Drive execution by tracking priorities, timelines, and deliverables across teams.

  • Team growth: Shape culture by running onboarding, organizing team events, and strengthening internal communication.

  • Founder support: Manage calendars, coordinate meetings, and handle logistics to maximize founder productivity.

  • Knowledge & office management: Ensure smooth information flow and manage the office environment to support high-performance work.