Member of Technical Staff - ML Infra (Data)

Nuance Labs

$200K — $300K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in building large-scale data pipelines in production settings.
  • Proficient with distributed data processing frameworks like Spark, Ray, or Dask.
  • Strong software engineering skills, focusing on clean, testable code.
  • Experience with multimodal data processing.
  • Familiarity with machine learning data pipelines and their quality implications.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement data pipelines for multimodal data ingestion and curation.
  • Transform research data processing scripts into production-ready solutions quickly.
  • Optimize data pipeline efficiency to eliminate bottlenecks in processing.
  • Develop and maintain systems for data quality assurance at scale.
  • Manage large-scale datasets, focusing on storage and tracking efficiency.
  • Collaborate with researchers to align data processing with their needs.
  • Create tools that enhance the research team's efficiency in handling data.

Benefits

  • Generous HSA plan with approximately $2,000 annual company contributions, exceeding industry standards.
  • 15 days of PTO plus public holidays and a week closure during year-end.
  • Free lunch, drinks, and snacks available every workday.
  • Commuter benefits to assist with transportation costs to the office.
  • 401(k) plan under development.
Full Job Description
About the Role

Model quality is ultimately a data problem. The best architecture and the best training run can't outrun bad, slow, or poorly curated data - and at the scale we're operating, the difference between a good data pipeline and a great one shows up directly in the model.

We're looking for someone who lives and breathes data at scale. You know how to build pipelines that are fast, reliable, and maintainable - and you're just as comfortable taking a researcher's messy processing script and turning it into something that runs on petabytes as you are designing a new pipeline architecture from scratch. Research moves fast here, and the ability to productionize quickly without losing fidelity is the core skill.

Our data is multimodal - video, audio, and text - and the processing requirements are demanding: high throughput, low error rates, and strict quality filters. There's a lot of interesting engineering work here, and the impact is direct and measurable.
What You'll Do
  • Design, build, and operate large-scale data pipelines for ingestion, processing, filtering, and curation of multimodal training data (video, audio, text)
  • Take research-grade data processing code and turn it into robust, production-level pipelines - quickly and without losing correctness
  • Optimize pipeline throughput and efficiency at scale; identify and eliminate bottlenecks across compute, I/O, and storage
  • Build and maintain data quality systems - deduplication, filtering, validation, and quality scoring at scale
  • Manage petabyte-scale datasets: storage architecture, versioning, lineage tracking, and cost efficiency
  • Work closely with researchers to understand data requirements and translate them into scalable processing systems
  • Build tooling and infrastructure that makes the research team faster - efficient data access, reproducible processing, and fast iteration loops
What We're Looking For
  • Proven experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines in production - you've processed data at a scale where naive approaches break
  • Strong proficiency with distributed data processing frameworks - Spark, Ray, Dask, or similar - and a clear sense of when to use each
  • Solid software engineering fundamentals: you write clean, testable, maintainable code and understand why that matters when pipelines run unattended at scale
  • Experience with multimodal data (video, audio) is a strong plus - understanding of formats, codecs, and processing libraries (FFmpeg, decord, etc.)
  • Familiarity with ML data pipelines specifically - understanding of how data quality and format affect model training
  • Ability to move fast: you can take a prototype script from a researcher and ship a production version in days, not weeks
Bonus Points
  • Experience building data pipelines for large-scale model training (pre-training or fine-tuning)
  • Familiarity with data versioning and lineage tools (DVC, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, etc.)
  • Experience with streaming data pipelines or online data processing
  • Prior work at an AI lab, video platform, or other data-intensive company
  • Contributions to open-source data tooling
Compensation

$200,000 - $300,000 base salary, plus meaningful equity. We think long-term ownership matters and structure equity accordingly.

Logistics
  • Location: In-person in Seattle, five days a week - we believe in the compounding value of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
  • Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas (O-1, H-1B, green card) from day one.
  • AI-native tooling: Do your best work with the best tools, including unlimited tokens.
Benefits
  • Health: HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions - roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
  • Time off: 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
  • Food: Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday - the small thing that quietly makes the day better.
  • Commuter benefits: We help cover the cost of getting to the office.
  • 401(k): In the works.


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