Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)

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:

The Media Team at Cantina is building the real-time infrastructure powering live conversations between people and AI characters. Our goal is simple to express but challenging to make real: enabling fast natural and truly conversational interaction with diverse and creative characters.

Were looking for a Software Engineer to help improve the speech audio and media systems at the heart of the Cantina experience.

This teams responsibilities cover low-level media processing pipelines integration with internal and external models for speech recognition and synthesis and globally distributed WebRTC-based infrastructure supporting real-time voice and video interactions across iOS Android and web.

If youre excited by high-performance C real-time systems speech technologies and building the future of conversational AI wed love to talk.

What Youll Do:

• Improve the real-time speech and media systems powering live AI conversations.

• Reduce latency and optimize responsiveness across audio streaming and speech pipelines.

• Build tools to enable the creation of AI models to support speech processing.

• Develop new voice and video capabilities that enable more immersive interactions between users and AI bots.

• Improve and extend our custom WebRTC infrastructure across iOS Android and web.

What Youll Bring:

Minimum qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science Computer Engineering or a related field; or equivalent experience.

• 3 years of experience working as a software engineer.

• Excellent communications skills.

• Demonstrated ability to work independently to drive projects from requirements to completion.

• Experience with C or C in a professional context.

• Grounding in computer science fundamentals including memory management high-performance data structures and concurrent / multithreaded systems.

• Exposure to system programming concepts including network protocol design asynchronous I/O and distributed system architectures..

• Object-oriented development and design skills.

• Interest in solving subtle and challenging engineering problems.

Preferred qualifications:

• Previous experience with WebRTC streaming protocols or other media-adjacent technologies.

• Familiarity with media processing techniques..

• Experience creating backend server infrastructure.

• Experience developing software for iOS or Android.

• Familiarity with building services using or Go.

• Familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques particularly in relation to speech recognition and synthesis.

Compensation:

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $180000-$270000. 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:

Staff IC