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About The Company
Cantina is an innovative social platform founded by Sean Parker, dedicated to redefining digital interaction through advanced AI technology. Our platform features the most sophisticated AI character creator, enabling lifelike, social AI bots capable of engaging across various online channels—voice, video, and text. Users can create personalized avatars, explore new identities, or select from a vast library of characters to share customized content and participate in seamless group chats. At Cantina, we are passionate about harnessing AI to enhance creativity and social connectivity, building the future of digital social experiences. Join us if you are eager to contribute to groundbreaking AI innovations that shape how people interact online.
About The Role
We are seeking a talented Research / Machine Learning Engineer to join our Speech Team. In this role, you will be instrumental in developing state-of-the-art speech systems from end-to-end, encompassing data specifications through to production inference. Your primary focus will be on advancing models related to text-to-speech (TTS), voice cloning, controllable TTS, voice conversion, and related tasks. Collaborating closely with research, data, and infrastructure teams, you will help ship reliable, scalable, and cost-effective models. This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, controllable, and trustworthy AI systems that push the boundaries of conversational AI and speech technology.
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Qualifications
- Exceptional research and development experience with large-scale audio models (>3 billion parameters and >500,000 hours of data)
- Deep understanding and hands-on experience with transformer architectures, diffusion models, and audio language modeling
- Proficiency in multi-node and multi-GPU distributed model training
- Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex, reliable systems
- Expertise in PyTorch, performance optimization (profiling, CUDA, Triton, C++), and production-quality code development
- Experience deploying large-scale speech/audio models into production environments
- Background working with extensive ML datasets, including data curation, augmentation, and synthetic data strategies
- Ability to analyze and improve model quality using subjective and objective evaluation signals
- Notable publications and/or open source contributions in speech, audio, or ML communities
- Experience with voice cloning, speech control, and voice generation technologies
Responsibilities
- Architect, implement, pre-train, fine-tune, and align large-scale speech models, including tasks like GRPO/DPO
- Independently lead small research initiatives while collaborating on larger team projects
- Design, execute, and analyze scientific experiments to improve model performance and understanding
- Develop and enhance development tools to streamline team productivity and efficiency
- Contribute to the entire ML pipeline, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design
- Define data requirements and collaborate on data acquisition, curation, augmentation, labeling, and synthetic data strategies
- Design automated evaluation procedures, including listening tests, SV/WER metrics, robustness checks, bias assessments, and red-team studies
- Harden the training, evaluation, and inference pipelines, ensuring latency, memory, and cost optimization, while meeting production SLAs
- Partner with infrastructure teams to scale training and inference across cloud fleets, ensuring model reliability and observability
- Contribute to safety protocols, consent guardrails, and measures to prevent misuse and abuse of speech AI systems
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Benefits
- Competitive salary and generous equity package
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, with premiums covered by Cantina
- 42 days of paid time off, including 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 holidays, and 2 floating holidays
- Parental leave and fertility support programs
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Lifestyle spending account of $500 per month for personal use
- Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
- Membership to One Medical and additional wellness benefits
Equal Opportunity
Cantina is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status.
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