Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)

About the role

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.

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.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

Pay

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $180,000-$270,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

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
• Lifestyle spending account – $500/month to use however you’d like
• Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
• One Medical membership, and more!