About
Cantina is a social platform featuring an AI character creator. Its lifelike social characters interact across voice, video, and text, enabling users to create characters and share personalized content and group chats.
Responsibilities
•Architect, implement, pre-train, fine-tune, and post-train or align large-scale speech models
•Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance understanding of models
•Develop and improve tools that enhance team productivity
•Contribute across the stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design
•Define data requirements and collaborate on data acquisition, curation, augmentation, labeling quality, and synthetic data strategies
•Design automated objective and subjective evaluations, including listening tests, SV/WER/ASR-based metrics, robustness and bias checks, and red-team studies
•Harden the training, evaluation, and inference pipeline; profile latency, memory, and cost; and meet production SLAs with robust monitoring and rollback
•Contribute to safety and consent guardrails and mitigate misuse and abuse of speech technology
Requirements
•Exceptional research or development experience with large-scale audio models (>8B parameters, >500k hours of data)
•Deep hands-on experience with diffusion and/or flow-matching transformers, including samplers, schedules, conditioning mechanisms, and distillation
•Deep hands-on experience training audio VAEs, neural audio codecs, and vocoders, including latent/tokenizer design, reconstruction and perceptual objectives, and adversarial training
•Strong experience with multi-node, multi-GPU distributed training (FSDP/DeepSpeed or equivalent)
•Strong software engineering skills and a proven track record of building complex systems
•Strong PyTorch skills, performance profiling, CUDA/Triton/C++ as needed, and production-quality coding
•Experience shipping large-scale speech/audio or multimodal generative models to production
•Background working with large-scale ML data and ability to iterate on data and assess quality using subjective and objective signals
•Experience with voice cloning, speech control/steerability, or expressive speech generation
•Notable publications and/or open-source contributions in speech/audio/ML
Benefits
•Competitive salary and generous company equity
•Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina
•42 days of paid time off: 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays
•Generous parental leave and fertility support
•401(K) retirement savings plan
•Lifestyle spending account of $500/month
•Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
•One Medical membership and other benefits
