---
title: 'Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle at Cantina'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-growth-lifecycle-cantina-san-francisco-fs4n56y79qc2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle at Cantina

- **Company:** Cantina
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cantina/2658cf22-7b84-4f71-9dc1-987d05781fb8

## 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: We're hiring a Lifecycle Product Manager to own how Cantina reaches users outside the app and brings them back to value inside it. Sitting on the product management team, you'll own the end-to-end user journey across email, push, and in-product messaging — and, critically, the deep-linked landing and post-click experiences that complete the loop. You'll develop a deep qualitative and quantitative understanding of how people move through Cantina, turn that into a lifecycle strategy that grows activation, retention, and resurrection, and partner with Data and Engineering to launch, measure, and compound improvements. This is a hands-on role with company-wide visibility: you'll write the strategy, ship the journeys, run the experiments, and bring senior stakeholders along.

What You'll Do:

- Own the lifecycle strategy and roadmap for Cantina's owned channels, mapping journeys across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.
- Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging — including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.
- Optimize the lifecycle portfolio, not just individual sends: improve message inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency so users get fewer, better-timed messages.
- Build a deep, evidence-based picture of the user journey — combining product analytics, cohort and funnel analysis with qualitative signals like session reviews, support themes, and user research — and use it to find where users stall and what would move them.
- Design and run experiments (A/B tests, holdouts, incrementality reads) and hold the bar on measurement: retained activity and incremental value, not opens and clicks.
- Partner with the Data team to build the measurement system behind lifecycle — instrumentation, eligibility and audience definitions, dashboards, and experiment readouts.
- Partner with Engineering to ship campaigns end to end: triggers, personalization payloads, deep links, and the in-product surfaces each journey lands on.
- Define the operating model — intake, templates, approvals, QA, and quality standards — so lifecycle scales across teams without channel chaos or user fatigue.
- Set and communicate strategy to senior stakeholders, translating a messy portfolio into a clear multi-quarter direction and defending tradeoffs with data.

What You'll Bring:

- 6+ years in product management, growth, lifecycle/CRM, or retention — ideally in a consumer mobile or AI product operating at scale.
- Demonstrated ownership of lifecycle or engagement programs that moved a real business metric (activation, D30 retention, resurrection, or conversion), with the analysis to prove it.
- Strong quantitative fluency: comfortable writing your own SQL and working in a BI/analytics tool (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Hex, Looker, or similar) to build funnels, cohorts, and retention curves without waiting on a queue.
- Hands-on experience with a lifecycle/CRM platform (Braze, Iterable, [Customer.io](http://Customer.io), or similar) — segmentation, triggered canvases, personalization, and deliverability.
- Rigorous experimentation judgment: you understand holdouts, incrementality, sample sizing, and the difference between a delivery metric and a value metric.
- Technical and product fluency across event and identity models, APIs, deep linking, and push/email infrastructure — enough to design a system with Engineering. Coding not required.
- Excellent written communication and cross-functional influence, with a track record of aligning senior stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Data, Design, and Marketing.
- Craft-level instinct for messaging: you can write the copy, critique the journey, and tell when a notification is helpful versus annoying.
- Preferred: experience with AI/consumer-social products, localization or multi-market lifecycle, and building lifecycle tooling or self-service platforms with Engineering.

Compensation: The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $175,000 - $250,000. 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
- [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