---
title: 'Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels) at Cantina'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/media-software-engineer-speech-senior-staff-levels-cantina-sunnyvale-amr9rvpwq2gp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels) at Cantina

- **Company:** Cantina
- **Location:** Sunnyvale, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/01b8f45c-cb9b-4255-ad2d-c9ac1e5c4b2f

## 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: 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. We’re looking for a Software Engineer to help improve the speech, audio, and media systems at the heart of the Cantina experience. This team’s 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 you’re excited by high-performance C++, real-time systems, speech technologies, and building the future of conversational AI, we’d love to talk.

What You’ll 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 You’ll 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 [Node.js](http://node.js) 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 $180,000-$270,000. 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
- [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