# Member of Technical Staff — RL Research (New PhD Grad) at Nuance Labs

- Company: Nuance Labs
- What the company does: We are building visual conversational AI that feels human. Backed by Accel, Lightspeed and South Park Commons.
- Company website: https://www.nuancelabs.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: Seattle, Washington
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $250K to $350K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-11
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/nuancelabs/jobs/4283946009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/nuance-labs-member-of-technical-staff-rl-research-new-phd-grad/

## About the role

We’re looking for a deeply technical Member of Technical Staff to own RL and post-training for large-scale omni models. This posting is aimed at researchers who are completing — or have recently completed — a PhD and want to do their best work at a fast-moving frontier lab.

## What they're looking for

- A PhD — completed, or in its final stretch — in ML, RL, or a related field, with research depth shown through publications, a strong lab/advisor, or substantial open-source work
- Solid understanding of RL/post-training methods: policy optimization, reward modeling, preference optimization, rejection sampling, KL control, evaluation, and data feedback loops
- Ability to reason about model behavior and training dynamics: reward hacking, unstable rewards, distribution shift, stale policies, mode collapse, over-optimization, noisy preferences, and evaluation mismatch
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the appetite to build real systems, not just prototypes
- Curiosity and adaptability toward new RL algorithms, model architectures, serving systems, evaluation methods, and research ideas

Tags: Research