Machine Learning Engineer, Speech - Joint Audio-Video Modeling

Location

------------

Remote (U.S. or Europe)

Employment Type

-------------------

Full time

Department

--------------

Research

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 looking for a Research / ML Engineer to join our Speech Team to build state-of-the-art speech and audio generation systems end-to-end from data specs through production inference with a focus on joint audio-video modeling.

You'll own the audio side of multimodal generation: the representations (audio VAEs, neural codecs), the generative backbone (diffusion / flow-matching transformers), and the conditioning and alignment machinery that makes characters speak, sing, and emote in sync with what's on screen. That includes voice cloning and multi-speaker conditioning inside joint AV models, cinematic dialogue with music and sound design, and adjacent speech tasks (controllable TTS, voice conversion) that feed the same stack.

You'll drive the model data eval flywheel, partnering closely with research, video, data, and infra to ship fast, reliable, and cost-aware models. In this role you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, steerable, and trustworthy AI systems.

You will thrive in this role if you

• See research and engineering as two sides of the same coin and enjoy owning work end-to-end.
• Are excited to work across modalities and collaborate closely with a video generation team rather than s