Prompt Engineer

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 youre excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions join us in building the future!

About the Role:

As a Prompt Engineer at Cantina Labs you will operate at the frontier of social generative AIshaping how millions of users experience storytelling and connection through AI characters. Youll collaborate closely with product design and engineering to discover what makes AI characters engaging scalable and hyper-realisticand translate those insights into prompt systems datasets and evaluation frameworks that power Cantinas platform.

This role bridges research and product pairing rigorous prompt engineering with strategic reasoning about model behavior and user experience. Youll own and shape how bots think speak and act across the products features balancing immediate product needs with long-term behavioral goals. Your work will directly impact the consistency expressiveness and realism of Cantinas AI characters at scale.

What Youll Do:

• Define and author core behavior system prompts that shape how Cantina bots express personality emotion dialect and social behavior across text voice image and video.

• Identify key personality traits that make AI personas compelling and create datasets and prompt structures that reliably reproduce those traits.

• Prototype new bot traits and product features through prompt engineering and iterate based on qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

• Balance short-term feature development with long-term behavioral consistency and quality across the Cantina ecosystem.

• Collaborate with research to build and maintain behavioral evaluations that measure bot performance personality fidelity and interaction quality over time.

• Partner with product design and engineering to translate creative intent and user feedback into scalable prompt systems.

• Review refine and evolve prompts as they move into production helping establish best practices and launch criteria.

• Track emerging issues in bot behavior prioritize improvements and drive prompt-level solutions in ambiguous or high-impact areas.

• Document model quirks prompting strategies and guidelines to scale prompt development across teams.

• Support research and ML in our training efforts by delivering meta-prompts for our synthetic data pipelines and evaluating new model behavior

What Youll Bring:

• 3 years of experience prompt engineering and developing LLM-based features end-to-end.

• Strong experience writing testing and iterating on complex multi-step and system-level prompts.

• Deep understanding of LLM capabilities limitations and quirks with strong intuition for how input design shapes model behavior.

• Experience creating datasets and evaluating model outputs in collaboration with ML or product teams.

• Strong grounding in psychology sociology linguistics or related fields as they relate to personality behavior and dialect.

• Methodical hypothesis-driven approach to experimentation and iteration.

• Ability to manage multiple initiatives prioritize effectively and operate independently in ambiguous fast-moving environments.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain prompt design decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Comfortable communicating with executive-level stakeholders.

• Basic Python familiarity and comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases

Compensation:

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $150000-$180000. When determining compensation a number of factors will be considered including skills experience job scope location and competitive compensation market data.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and generous company equity

• Medical dental and vision insurance 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina

• 42 days of paid time off including:

  • 15 PTO days

  • 10 sick days

  • 15 company holidays

  • 2 floating holidays

• Generous parental leave & fertility support

• 401(k) retirement savings plan

• Lifestyle spending account $500/month to use however youd like

• Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees

• One Medical membership and more!

Required Experience:

IC