machine learning engineer for speech systems

Cantina is a social platform with an AI character creator. Its lifelike AI characters interact across voice, video, and text, enabling personalized content and group chat.

• Architect, implement, pre-train, fine-tune, and post-train large-scale speech models;
• Independently lead small research projects and collaborate on larger team initiatives;
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments;
• Develop and improve development tooling;
• Contribute across the stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design;
• Define data requirements and collaborate on 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 monitoring and rollback;
• Partner with infrastructure on distributed training and inference on cloud fleets;
• Productionize models with reliability and observability;
• Contribute to safety and consent guardrails and misuse and abuse mitigation.

• Exceptional research and development experience with large-scale audio models, including models over 3B parameters and over 500k hours of data;
• Exceptional understanding and hands-on experience with transformer architectures, diffusion models including distillation and streaming, or audio language modeling;
• Strong experience with multi-node and multi-GPU distributed model training;
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building complex systems;
• Strong PyTorch and performance engineering skills, including profiling and CUDA/Triton/C++ as needed;
• Experience writing reliable, production-quality code;
• Experience shipping large-scale speech and audio models to production;
• Background working with large-scale ML data;
• Ability to iterate on data and assess quality using subjective and objective signals;
• Notable publications or open-source contributions in speech, audio, or ML;
• Experience with voice cloning, speech control, or voice generation;
• Nice to have: Experience shipping large-scale TTS, VC, or ASR models to production, work on large-scale ML systems, experience with audio language modeling and transformer architectures, experience with voice cloning, speech control, or voice generation, background in processing large-scale ML data, publications or notable open-source contributions in speech, audio, or ML.

• Annual base salary range: $200,000-$220,000 (€170,000-€190,000);
• 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, including 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.