Data Scientist, Recommendations and Personalization

Cantina, founded by Sean Parker, is a new social platform with the most advanced AI character creator. We enable users to build, share, and interact with AI bots and friends directly in Cantina or across the internet.

Our bots are lifelike, social creatures capable of interacting wherever humans go online. Users can recreate themselves using powerful AI, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of existing characters. Bots represent a new media type that offers creators a way to share infinitely scalable and personalized content experiences combined with seamless group chat across voice, video, and text.

We're looking for a founding Data Scientist to lead personalization and recommendation on Feed and other parts of the Cantina app. You will shape how we use data to power recommendations, user-bot interaction, and social experiences at scale. You’ll be working directly with key product and executive stakeholders, including Sean Parker, to turn data into product-shaping insights and models.

You’ll own the full lifecycle—from data pipelining to modeling to dashboards—to deliver insights that guide strategy and build ML systems that move metrics.

• Experience building personalization for feed ranking systems

• Design, train, and deploy lightweight ML models (e.g. regression, recommendation, neural nets) for real-time applications

• Partner with product and engineering to define and run user experiments and A/B tests

• Build the foundation of user growth from feed, delivering insights to drive engagement and retention

• Build pipelines and foundational metrics for user engagement, retention, and content performance

• Build/integrate tools to explain and debug ML models

• 5+ years experience in data science, preferably in consumer tech or social platforms

• Exceptional SQL skills with demonstrated ability to work with complex data structures

• Skilled in Python and standard data science/ML tools (e.g. Pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch)

• Experience building and productionizing models for personalization, recommendation, or ranking

• Strong understanding of experimentation and A/B testing

• Confident building dashboards for executives and visualizing impact clearly

• Comfortable owning end-to-end analytics: from data modeling to insight to delivery

• Self-directed, with a bias for action—you can go from zero to insight/model

• Bonus: experience with user behavior modeling, fraud/risk analytics, or social content systems

• Python, SQL

• PyTorch for ML Model Prototyping

• AWS or GCP for infrastructure

• Experimentation framework

• Real-time pipelines and feature engineering

This is a hybrid role, preferably based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pay Equity: 

In compliance with Pay Transparency Laws, the base salary range for this role is between $150,000- 225,000 for those located in San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

• Health Care —  99% of premiums for medical, vision, dental are fully paid for by Cantina, plus One Medical membership.

• Monthly Wellness Stipend — $500/month to use on whatever you’d like! 

• Rest and Recharge — 15 PTO days per year, 10 sick days, all Federal holidays, and 2 floating holidays.

• 401(K) — Eligible to participate on day one of employment.

• Parental Leave & Fertility Support 

• Competitive Salary & Equity 

• Lunch and snacks provided for in-office employees. 

• WFH equipment provided for full-time hybrid/remote employees.