ML Speech Engineer at Cantina - Remote US/Europe — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Location Flexibility: Cantina lists this role as open to candidates in both the US and Europe, suggesting meaningful geographic flexibility. However, the job description does not explicitly state "fully remote" — the mention of "complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees" hints that an office option (likely in the US) exists, but remote candidates in Europe appear welcome.
Timezone Considerations: With team members potentially spanning US and European timezones, expect some overlap windows (likely 9am–1pm PT / 5pm–9pm CET). Deep research/ML work is largely async-compatible, but synchronous collaboration for experiments and code reviews will likely require predictable daily availability. This is not a fully async role.
Visa & Nomad Options: If you're a US-based engineer, popular nomad destinations like Portugal (D8 Digital Nomad Visa) or Spain (Digital Nomad Visa) are viable. For European candidates, working within your EU country of residence is straightforward. Non-EU nomads should note that European work-authorization may be required depending on contract type.
Lifestyle Stipend Advantage: The $500/month lifestyle spending account is a standout perk for nomads — this can cover coworking memberships, travel gear, or internet costs in destinations like Bangkok (~$300/mo for coworking + fast internet) or Medellín (~$150/mo). This stipend significantly offsets nomad overhead costs.
- Lisbon: ~$2,500–3,500/mo comfortable living; stipend covers coworking
- Bangkok: ~$1,500–2,000/mo; excellent GPU-friendly coworking options
- Medellín: ~$1,200–1,800/mo; growing tech nomad scene
About Cantina
Cantina is a new social platform founded by Sean Parker with the most advanced AI character creator. Our bots are lifelike, social creatures that can interact wherever people are online—across voice, video, and text. Create yourself, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of characters to share infinitely scalable, personalized content and seamless group chat.
If you're excited about how AI can shape creativity and social interaction, come help us build what's next.
About the Role
We're looking for a Research / ML Engineer to join our Speech Team to build state-of-the-art speech systems end-to-end—from data specs through production inference. You'll drive the model ↔ data ↔ eval flywheel for TTS and adjacent tasks (voice cloning, controllable TTS, voice conversion and more), partnering closely with research, data, and infra to ship fast, reliable, and cost-aware models. In this role, you will work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, steerable, and trustworthy AI systems.
What You'll Do
Model Building: Architect, implement, pre-train, fine-tune, and post-train/alignment (e.g., GRPO/DPO) for large-scale speech models.
Project Leadership: Independently lead small research projects while collaborating on larger team initiatives.
Experimental Design: Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of the models.
Tool Development: Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity.
Full-Stack Contribution: Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design.
Data Ownership: Define data requirements and collaborate on acquisition, curation, augmentation, labeling quality, and synthetic data strategies.
Rigorous Evaluation: Design automated objective/subjective evaluations—listening tests, SV/WER/ASR-based metrics, robustness & bias checks, and red-team studies.
Pipeline Delivery: Harden the training → evaluation → inference pipeline; profile latency, memory, and cost; and meet production SLAs with robust monitoring and rollback.
GPU Scaling: Partner with infrastructure to run distributed training/inference on cloud fleets and productionize models with reliability and observability.
Safety & Responsibility: Contribute to safety/consent guardrails and to misuse/abuse mitigation for responsible speech technology.
What You'll Bring
Exceptional research/development experience with large-scale audio models (>3B models and >500k hours data).
Exceptional understanding and hands-on experience with transformer architectures and/or diffusion models (including distillation and streaming) and/or audio language modelling.
Strong experience with multi-node and multi-GPU distributed model training.
Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems.
Strong with PyTorch and performance work (profiling, CUDA/Triton/C++ as needed) and writing reliable production-quality code.
Shipped large-scale speech/audio models to production.
Background in working with large-scale ML data.
Ability to iterate on data and triangulate quality using subjective and objective signals.
Notable publications and/or open-source contributions in speech/audio/ML.
Experience with voice cloning, speech control, and voice generation.
Preferred Experience
Shipped large-scale speech/audio models (TTS/VC/ASR) to production.
Work on large-scale ML systems.
Experience with audio language modelling and transformer architectures.
Experience with voice cloning, speech control, and voice generation.
Background in processing large-scale ML data.
Publications or notable open-source contributions in speech/audio/ML.
Compensation
When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.
Benefits for U.S.-based roles:
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!
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role fully remote or is there an office requirement?
What speech AI technologies will I work with day-to-day?
What benefits are included for US-based employees?
What experience level is Cantina looking for in this role?
Does this role involve any safety or ethical AI responsibilities?
