About Cantina

Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. We bring characters to life, transforming how people tell stories, connect, and create. We build and power ecosystems. Cantina, our flagship social AI platform, is just the beginning.

If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!

About The Role

We are looking for a new Member of Technical Staff to build and scale the data pipelines behind our large video generation models. This role is focused on collecting large amounts of relevant video data, preparing high-quality training samples, and developing robust preprocessing, filtering, and parsing workflows. You'll orchestrate annotation pipelines across platforms such as MTurk and own the full lifecycle of training data, from raw ingestion to clean, model-ready samples that directly drive quality improvements. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering and ML research, making it central to how we turn messy real-world data into the fuel that moves our models forward.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain data pipelines for large video generation models, including data ingestion, parsing, filtering, preprocessing, and dataset curation at scale, using tools such as AWS S3 and DynamoDB.
• Design and run annotation workflows across platforms such as MTurk, Prolific, and Mechanical Turk, including task design, quality control, and label validation.
• Train, evaluate, and improve smaller supporting models used for data filtering, quality assessment, preprocessing, or other parts of the ML pipeline.
• Partner closely with research and engineering teams to turn experimental workflows into scalable, repeatable systems that support model training and evaluation.
• Own data quality across the pipeline by identifying bottlenecks, failure modes, and low-quality sources, and continuously improving tooling and processes.
• Build internal tools and automation that make it easier to prepare datasets, launch annotation jobs, monitor outputs, and support model development end to end.
• Drive larger pipeline projects from start to finish, such as new dataset creation efforts or upgrades to labeling and preprocessing infrastructure.
• Work within a Kubernetes-based training infrastructure, ensuring datasets are properly prepared, formatted, and delivered to training clusters.
• Profile and optimize research model inference scripts used in preprocessing steps, ensuring that model-driven filtering and transformation stages run within practical time and cost constraints when applied to large-scale raw data.