Applied Research Engineering Manager

A bit about Cantina:

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

Cantina bots are lifelike, social creatures, capable of interacting wherever humans go on the internet. Recreate yourself using powerful AI, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of existing characters. Bots are a new media type that offer a way for creators to share infinitely scalable and personalized content experiences combined with seamless group chat across voice, video, and text.

If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!

A bit about the role: 

As our Applied Research Engineering Manager, you'll lead the team responsible for developing and scaling our core AI capabilities, enabling lifelike bot interactions across the platform.

You'll lead the machine learning engineers responsible for Cantina's text and image-based AI infrastructure, overseeing everything from model fine-tuning and inference optimization to bot personality development and natural language understanding. This role combines platform architecture leadership with the specific challenges of building highly scalable, responsive text and image generation systems.

You will:

• Lead and grow a team of Machine Learning Engineers and Researchers focused on text and image-based AI systems

• Architect and implement scalable infrastructure for model training, fine-tuning, and inference

• Design and optimize response generation systems for natural, contextually-aware bot conversations

• Build robust intent detection and bot classification systems to enable sophisticated interactions

• Develop efficient bot building pipelines that enable rapid personality creation and iteration

• Create frameworks for measuring and improving text generation quality and performance

• Establish infrastructure for continuous model improvement through user interaction data

• Balance real-time performance requirements with model quality and resource utilization

A bit about you:

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with 2+ years managing teams

• Deep expertise in NLP, language models, and conversational AI systems

• Experience building and scaling production ML infrastructure

• Strong track record of leading teams building high-performance, user-facing AI systems

• Background in real-time systems and performance optimization

• Experience with modern ML frameworks and cloud infrastructure

• Track record of successful cross-functional collaboration

This is a hybrid role, preferably based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, CA

Pay Equity: 

In compliance with Pay Transparency Laws, the base salary range for this role is between $225,000-300,000 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.