Machine Learning Engineer, TTS
At a glance
Mid-level Machine Learning Engineering role at Cantina. Remote, United States · full-time · no salary stated · we estimate $142,500–$229,847 across the United States.
Cantina has not published a salary for this role. The figure below is our estimate, not theirs.
remoteroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build speech models from initial design through pre-training, fine-tuning, alignment and production inference
- Run and interpret experiments, while leading smaller research efforts and contributing to broader team projects
- Set data needs and work with partners on collection, curation, augmentation, labeling quality and synthetic data
- Create speech evaluations, then strengthen training and inference pipelines for latency, cost, reliability and monitoring
- Improve developer tools and distributed GPU workflows, and help add safety measures against misuse
What you bring
- You have developed large audio models at the scale of over three billion parameters and more than five hundred thousand hours of data
- You bring hands-on experience with transformer or diffusion models, plus multi-node and multi-GPU training
- You have shipped large speech or audio models and built complex ML systems using PyTorch and production-quality code
- You can assess audio quality with both listening-based judgments and objective measures
Who this fits
This role suits a mid-level engineer who can own smaller research projects and contribute across the speech stack. It is remote and open to people based in the United States. You’ll work with research, data and infrastructure partners, with responsibilities spanning model research, data, evaluation and production delivery.
From the employer
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 (inc. 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, 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, transformer architectures.
Experience with voice-cloning, speech-control, voice-generation.
Background in processing large-scale ML data.
Publications or notable open-source 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!
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