Media Software Engineer (Real-Time)

A bit about Cantina:

Cantina, founded by Sean Parker, is a new social platform with the most advanced AI character creator. Build, share, and interact with AI bots and your friends directly in the Cantina or across the internet.

Cantina bots are lifelike, social creatures, capable of interacting wherever humans go on the internet. Recreate yourself using powerful AI, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of existing characters. Bots are a new media type that offer a way for creators to share infinitely scalable and personalized content experiences combined with seamless group chat across voice, video, and text.

If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!

 A bit about the role:

The media team at Cantina is creating one of the most advanced platforms for real-time and streaming media in the world. We're passionate about building high-performance, high-quality software and services that run the gamut from globally distributed infrastructure to highly optimized, device-level audio and video processing frameworks and advanced machine learning techniques. We are looking for engineers who want to work with exceptional people on challenging problems.

We're looking for an enthusiastic Software Engineer to help us provide a compelling experience for users who want to chat with friends and AI-powered bots by extending and improving the audio and video infrastructure that is at the heart of enabling real-time interactions in the Cantina app. 

A bit about Cantina:

Cantina, founded by Sean Parker, is a new social platform with the most advanced AI character creator. Build, share, and interact with AI bots and your friends directly in the Cantina or across the internet.

Cantina bots are lifelike, social creatures, capable of interacting wherever humans go on the internet. Recreate yourself using powerful AI, imagine someone new, or choose from thousands of existing characters. Bots are a new media type that offer a way for creators to share infinitely scalable and personalized content experiences combined with seamless group chat across voice, video, and text.

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

In this position, you’ll own multiple product areas and be responsible to help shape product directions, prototype new concepts, and own design end-to-end through implementation. You’ll be comfortable balancing insights from users, data, and product vision to craft coherent and elegant solutions that bring the most value to users. You’ll collaborate closely with the leadership team, product engineering and research & data science to execute on important initiatives. There are unlimited unique and exciting challenges at Cantina that require someone with natural product & UX sense, technical aptitude, great taste and craft.

A bit about the work:

• Enhance and extend the Cantina media platform.

• Add new features and capabilities to enable new ways for users to interact with their friends and AI bots through voice and video.

• Improve and maintain the custom, WebRTC-based frameworks we use to provide media services for iOS, Android, and web clients.

• Collect and analyze metrics relating to system performance and user behavior.

• Participate in detailed and constructive design and code reviews.

• Collaborate with other members of the team to deliver new features and enhancements on a regular basis.

• Work with application development teams to define APIs they can use to integrate with the media stack.

A bit about you:

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent experience.

• Experience with C or C++.

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including familiarity with data structures and concurrent / multithreaded programming.

• Exposure to system programming concepts, such as networking, memory management, distributed systems fundamentals.

• Object-oriented programming and design skills.

• Interest in solving challenging, hard-to-pin-down problems.

• Excellent communications skills.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, particularly in relation to speech recognition and synthesis.

• Previous experience with WebRTC, streaming protocols, or other media-related technologies.

• Familiarity with audio or video processing techniques and algorithms.

• Experience developing software for iOS and Android.

• Familiarity with building services using Node.js.

Location:

We have offices located in Sunnyvale, CA and Brooklyn, NY. While we offer fully remote and hybrid employment opportunities, our Media Engineering team strongly desires candidates to be available (or willing to relocate) to work in the Bay Area. For reference, 95% of the Media Engineering team works from the Bay Area.

Pay Equity: 

In compliance with Pay Transparency Laws, the base salary range for this role is between $110,000 - $145,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

Benefits:

• Flexible working arrangements – remote, office, or hybrid – the choice is often yours. We are open to ensuring quality candidates don’t experience barriers to success.

• Health Care –  99% company-paid health care, dental and vision (through amazing providers).  Taking care of our employees and their covered dependents is one way we demonstrate we care.

• Monthly Stipend  – Used for food, fun, travel, education to name a few… In general, almost anything goes.

• Mental wellbeing support – Access to an EAP (personal issues/financial/substance counseling), online  therapy for mental health, is one more way we demonstrate our care.

• Equity – Full-time employees are rewarded with equity – we all have a shared stake in Cantina’s success.

• 401(K) - Eligible to participate on day one of employment – save for your future!

• Short and Long Term Disability - Company paid.

• Life Insurance - 1x base pay, 100% company paid.

• Maternity/Paternity/Adoptive Leave - Generous maternity/paternity benefits

• PTO 15 paid PTO/vacation days per calendar year.

• Holidays - 13 paid holidays per calendar year.

• Sick Pay - 9 sick days per calendar year.

• Discounts - through Smart Perks.