Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)
About The Position
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.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice To Haves
- 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 or Go.
- Familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, particularly in relation to speech recognition and synthesis.
Responsibilities
- 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.
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
- $500/month lifestyle spending account
- Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
- One Medical membership
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
