---
title: 'Creative Director at Cantina'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-cantina-los-angeles-64xs4caw4ae7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Creative Director at Cantina

- **Company:** Cantina
- **Location:** Los Angeles, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/15e1b6d1-d395-4289-b83a-ba6355afdb74

## Job description

About Cantina: Cantina is a new social platform founded by Sean Parker with the most advanced AI character creator. Our bots are lifelike, social creatures that can interact wherever people are online—across voice, video, and text. Create yourself, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of characters to share infinitely scalable, personalized content and seamless group chat. If you’re excited about how AI can shape creativity and social interaction, come help us build what’s next.

About the Role: Cantina is looking for a Creative Director to own creative direction across original content, performance advertising, brand campaigns, and product storytelling. This is a hands-on role: you’ll come up with the concept, write the script, generate assets, work through the edit, and keep pushing until it lands. Some days you’ll direct a small team, and some days you’ll make the whole thing yourself.

What You’ll Do:

- Own creative direction across original content, performance advertising, brand campaigns, and product storytelling, defining our brand voice and making it recognizable everywhere.
- Turn product capabilities into concepts people actually want to watch, share, and try for themselves.
- Recruit and lead a team of 10 to 25 creatives, including creative directors, video editors, motion designers, visual designers, copywriters, screenwriters, producers, and AI filmmakers.
- Develop and produce video creative for paid social, organic social, product launches, and brand campaigns.
- Turn a product feature or consumer insight into a great hook, a clear story, and a reason to try Cantina.
- Write briefs, scripts, and treatments, build storyboards, and direct editors, designers, creators, and AI filmmakers.
- Make things yourself: cut video, create motion graphics, generate characters and scenes, experiment with voice and sound, and take concepts through to finished assets.
- Build performance creative testing plans with the growth team, testing concepts, hooks, offers, and calls to action, then using the results to decide what to make next.
- Develop platform-native creative with the right pacing, framing, captions, and aspect ratios for each placement.
- Keep a steady pipeline of fresh ideas and turn winning concepts into repeatable formats without running them into the ground.

What You’ll Bring:

- A strong portfolio of video creative, including performance advertising with measurable results.
- Great storytelling instincts: you know how to establish a character, create tension, and deliver a payoff in very little time.
- Hands-on proficiency with video editing and motion design tools.
- Experience directing small creative teams and giving clear, actionable feedback.
- An understanding of creative metrics like hook rate, hold rate, CTR, CVR, and CPA, and how to use them to improve the work.
- Practical experience with AI image, video, and audio production, including the iteration it takes to get a usable result.
- Speed, taste, and a willingness to try something strange if the idea is good.

Compensation: The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $250,000-$350,000. 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 you’d like
- Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
- One Medical membership, and more!

## About Cantina

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cantina is a social AI platform that lets users create, chat with, and share AI characters that talk, perform, and interact in real-time.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed; key leadership includes Co-Founder Prakash Ramakrishna

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Social AI / Social Media / Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (consumers), with a creator/developer ecosystem for building AI characters
- **Mission or purpose**: "Infinite Creativity Unlocked" — bringing AI characters to life to transform how people tell stories, connect, and create.

## Products & Services
- **Cantina App**: A social media platform where users chat with friends and AI, create video messages, share with friends, and "set bots free." The flagship product is a mobile-first experience focused on real-time AI character interaction.
- **Cantina AI Models**: A suite of advanced real-time models pushing the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism for AI characters.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — Seed Round (1 investor, amount undisclosed); 148 employees as of mid-2026
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 1 seed investor (name not publicly disclosed); member of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 7.2% YoY (+29 people) to 148 employees
  - Monthly website traffic growth of +47.7% and yearly growth of +149.8%
  - Active job postings: 13 (yearly job posting growth of +44.4%)
  - Operates in 15 countries with 4 offices (San Francisco HQ, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn NY, and another Brooklyn location)
  - High LinkedIn follower growth (+9.9% yearly) reaching 22,462 followers

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time AI character technology**: Builds proprietary real-time models for expression, personality, and realism — a technical moat in the rapidly growing social AI space.
- **Creator ecosystem**: Allows users to build and release their own AI characters, creating a network effect and UGC flywheel.
- **First-mover in social AI**: One of the earliest platforms combining social networking with generative AI characters for mass consumer use.
- **Strong talent pool**: Employees recruited from top tech companies including Airtime (18), Aircore (26), Meta (4), Grammarly (4), TikTok (4), Amazon (3), and BeReal (4).

## Strategic Focus
- **Product expansion**: Actively hiring for Kotlin Multiplatform Engineer, iOS Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer (Images), and Media Software Engineer (Speech) — indicating a push toward cross-platform mobile, image generation, and speech capabilities.
- **Safety and trust**: Joined the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) in 2025 and invested heavily in trust & safety infrastructure, signaling a commitment to responsible AI.
- **Monetization and growth**: Hiring a Head of Product Marketing, Creator Partner Manager, and Product Managers for Video and Web — suggesting moves toward monetization, creator partnerships, and web-based experiences.
- **Research-driven**: Actively recruiting ML engineers and research talent, with 10% of workforce in Research roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-edge AI work**: Engineers work on real-time AI models for speech, images, and character interaction — at the intersection of generative AI and social media.
- **Strong technical culture**: 66 employees (15% of workforce) in Technical roles, with a tech stack including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, Snowflake, and modern mobile frameworks (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Swift).
- **Growth stage**: At 148 employees and 13 open roles, this is a growth-stage startup where new hires can have outsized impact.
- **Flexible locations**: Offices in San Francisco (HQ), Sunnyvale, and Brooklyn (two locations) — with a distributed workforce across 15 countries.
- **Creative, fun environment**: Company culture emphasizes creativity ("Minister of Bots" is a real title) and viral social experiences.
- **Notable perks**: Team has a dedicated Comedy Director and "Chief Horse Officer" — indicating a playful, unconventional culture.
- **High talent density**: Recruits from top AI and social media companies (Meta, TikTok, Grammarly, Amazon, Apple, Netflix alumni).

## Sources
1. [cantina.com](https://cantina.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Cantina Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cantinaai)
3. [Cantina Careers (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina)
4. [Cantina Careers Page](https://cantina.com/careers)

## Other roles at Cantina

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- [Video Content Strategist and Editor](https://feeny.ai/job/video-content-strategist-and-editor-cantina-los-angeles-tqzb1rzkpmq1) — Los Angeles, CA
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