--- title: 'iOS Engineer (Senior-Staff Levels) at Cantina' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ios-engineer-senior-staff-levels-cantina-california-rqrs3c82f4sy' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # iOS Engineer (Senior-Staff Levels) at Cantina - **Company:** Cantina - **Location:** California - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2025-02-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/72fc1228-c538-41f6-a7ee-c54537c7bdab ## Job description 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 you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future! About the Role: As an iOS Engineer at Cantina, you’ll lead the development of innovative, high-performance features — from crafting personalized feeds and immersive custom UIs to empowering bots with AI-driven capabilities like chatting, text-to-speech, voice selection, image creation, and real-time media effects. Working closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Sean Parker, you’ll influence the direction of a product central to the company’s mission, move quickly to deliver impactful updates, and enjoy the autonomy to bring your ideas to life. We’re looking for someone who thrives on pushing the limits of iOS development and has a passion for creating visually stunning, high-performance experiences. Your expertise in custom graphics, animation frameworks, and media pipelines will help shape the creative foundation of our flagship app, elevating both user experience and innovation in the social AI space. What You’ll Do: - Work with frameworks and technologies like UIKit, AVFoundation, Combine, Core Animation, and more. - Lead development of new AI and media-driven features. - Build and optimize video/audio pipelines, real-time media effects, and AI-powered visual features. - Participate in Architecture meetings to help ensure our apps meet the highest quality standards. - Collaborate with Product, Design, and QA teams to deliver polished, scalable experiences. - Take ownership of features — be part of a small team that ships an application to a large user base. - Be part of an incredibly supportive team that values feedback, both positive and career-growth oriented. What You’ll Bring: - 8+ years of experience developing iOS applications, or equivalent education. - Fluency in Swift, UIKit, and Objective-C, with a strong foundation in custom graphics and animation frameworks. - Ability to write readable, maintainable, documented, and thoroughly tested code. - Experience developing integrations with RESTful APIs. - Proficiency with Git and version control workflows. - Basic understanding of Figma — able to determine spacing and sizing; bonus if you can export icons and understand variables. - Experience with video editing, real-time media effects, or AI-driven media features is a plus. - Ability to effectively translate Product, UX, and UI requirements into code. - Skilled at evaluating and communicating engineering solutions and trade-offs to teammates and potentially non-technical stakeholders. - Can create scalable and reusable components that are flexible and modular. - Attention to detail, motion, and animation. Compensation: The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $180,000-$240,000. 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 - [Research Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-intern-cantina-singapore-0t2dg9nfd7y1) — Singapore - [Machine Learning Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-intern-cantina-singapore-wnsca7rtewty) — Singapore - [Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-growth-lifecycle-cantina-san-francisco-fs4n56y79qc2) — San Francisco, CA - [Payments & Risk Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/payments-risk-operations-manager-cantina-bay-area-8vxjey1a9qp4) — Bay Area, OR - [Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)](https://feeny.ai/job/media-software-engineer-speech-senior-staff-levels-cantina-sunnyvale-amr9rvpwq2gp) — Sunnyvale, CA - [Machine Learning Engineer - Voice Conversion](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-voice-conversion-cantina-united-states-europe-fpbamgtxrfs0) — United States / Europe - [Machine Learning Engineer, Speech - Joint Audio-Video Modeling](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-speech-joint-audio-video-modeling-cantina-united-81jhte7m6h5q) — United States / Europe - [Machine Learning Engineer, Ops](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-ops-cantina-united-states-europe-zr6h1nf499dk) — United States / Europe - [Director, Brand Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/director-brand-marketing-cantina-los-angeles-dhngs7psnehq) — Los Angeles, CA - [Senior Creative Strategist, Performance Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-creative-strategist-performance-marketing-cantina-remote-gxzcxj5fv99e)