---
title: 'Machine Learning Intern at Cantina'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-intern-cantina-singapore-wnsca7rtewty'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Machine Learning Intern at Cantina

- **Company:** Cantina
- **Location:** Singapore
- **Employment:** internship
- **Posted:** 2026-09-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/16c7915e-9fd7-413f-b7ee-590589fbdc01

## Job description

## About Cantina

Cantina Labs is a social AI company developing a suite of advanced video generation models. 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.

## About the Internship

Cantina is growing its research lab in Singapore, and we are looking for exceptional machine learning interns to work with us on the next generation of video models in October 2026. This is a three month onsite internship designed to give you meaningful ownership of a well-defined research or engineering problem. You will be matched with a project based on your background and interests, working closely with a senior mentor from initial problem formulation through experimentation, evaluation, and, where appropriate, submission to a leading AI conference. Projects may focus on post-training and inference efficiency for video generation models, reward modeling and preference-based optimization, multimodal data systems, or scalable infrastructure for video model training. The primary focus will be your core project, with opportunities to contribute to applied or product-adjacent work where relevant.

## What You’ll Work On

Depending on your project, you may:

- Develop reward models to improve aesthetics, motion quality, temporal consistency, and prompt adherence
- Study how base-model behavior affects post-training outcomes and use experimental findings to inform model development
- Design rigorous evaluations and conduct large-scale experiments on generative video models
- Build systems for ingesting, preprocessing, curating, and delivering large-scale video datasets
- Develop distributed pipelines for dataset generation, deduplication, preprocessing, and repeated dataset refreshes
- Improve the reliability, reproducibility, and efficiency of data and model-training workflows
- Build tooling for video and multimodal data using technologies such as FFmpeg, PyAV, DALI, or OpenCV
- Contribute to evaluation harnesses, model integrations, research tooling, or other product-adjacent projects related to your core work
- Document and communicate your findings through research reports, internal presentations, demonstrations, and potential conference submissions

You may be a good fit if you

- Are pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, machine learning, or a related field
- Have experience building data pipelines, ML infrastructure, or distributed systems through research, coursework, open-source contributions, or previous internships
- Are familiar with tools such as Ray, PySpark, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies
- Have worked with cloud storage or compute platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure
- Understand practical considerations around data throughput, storage layout, caching, monitoring, and failure recovery
- Are proficient in Python and interested in building reliable systems for large-scale machine learning

Experience with video, image, audio, or other multimodal data is valuable. Publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, or AAAI are a plus, but are not required. We care most about the quality of your thinking, the depth of your technical work, and your ability to learn quickly.

## What You Can Expect

- A defined project and named senior mentor before your first day
- Weekly one-on-one meetings and clear project milestones
- A meaningful compute allocation for your research
- The opportunity to own a complete research or engineering result
- First-author positioning by default where your contribution supports a publication
- Timely internal review of research intended for submission
- Support for conference travel if your paper is accepted
- Opportunities to demonstrate your work and receive credit for product contributions
- A competitive monthly stipend
- Visa and travel support for eligible international candidates
- Housing support for qualifying international interns in Singapore
- Equipment and resources needed to complete your work

Internship Details

- Location: Singapore
- Duration: Three months
- Working model: Onsite
- Start dates: Start dates: First batch starts in October 2026; second batch starts in January 2027

## 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
- [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)
- [Staff Software Engineer, Backend](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-backend-cantina-los-angeles-y3jk4ycetkqy) — Los Angeles, CA / San Francisco, CA