{"id":93468,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2","title":"Machine Learning Engineer, TTS","company":{"id":6569,"name":"Cantina","domain":"cantina.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cantina","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0.105,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":60,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":false},{"name":"Diffusion Models","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"GRPO","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch C++","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"Triton","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-29T23:19:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T23:02:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":170,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":169},"description":"About Cantina\nCantina 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.\nIf you’re excited about how AI can shape creativity and social interaction, come help us build what’s next.\nAbout the Role:\nWe’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.\nWhat You’ll Do:\nModel Building: Architect, implement, pre-train, fine-tune, and post-train/alignment (e.g., GRPO/DPO) for large-scale speech models.\n\nProject Leadership: Independently lead small research projects while collaborating on larger team initiatives.\n\nExperimental Design: Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of the models.\n\nTool Development: Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity.\n\nFull-Stack Contribution: Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design.\n\nData Ownership: Define data requirements and collaborate on acquisition, curation, augmentation, labeling quality, and synthetic data strategies.\n\nRigorous Evaluation: Design automated objective/subjective evaluations-listening tests, SV/WER/ASR-based metrics, robustness & bias checks, and red-team studies.\n\nPipeline Delivery: Harden the training → evaluation → inference pipeline; profile latency, memory, and cost; and meet production SLAs with robust monitoring and rollback.\n\nGPU Scaling: Partner with infrastructure to run distributed training/inference on cloud fleets and productionize models with reliability and observability.\n\nSafety & Responsibility: Contribute to safety/consent guardrails and to misuse/abuse mitigation for responsible speech technology.\n\nWhat You’ll Bring:\nExceptional research/development experience with large scale audio models (>3B models and >500k hours data).\n\nExceptional understanding and hands-on experience with transformer architectures and/or diffusion models (inc. distillation and streaming) and/or audio language modelling.\n\nStrong experience with multi-node and multi-gpu distributed model training.\n\nStrong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems\n\nStrong with PyTorch and performance work (profiling, CUDA/Triton/C++ as needed) and writing reliable production quality code.\n\nShipped large scale speech/audio models to production.\n\nBackground in working with large-scale ML data.\n\nAbility to iterate on data,, and triangulate quality using subjective and objective signals.\n\nNotable publications and/or open source contributions in speech/audio/ML.\n\nExperience with voice-cloning, speech-control, voice-generation.\n\nPreferred Experience:\nShipped large scale speech/audio models (TTS/VC/ASR) to production.\n\nWork on large-scale ML systems.\n\nExperience with audio language modelling, transformer architectures.\n\nExperience with voice-cloning, speech-control, voice-generation.\n\nBackground in processing large-scale ML data.\n\nPublications or notable open-source in speech/audio/ML.\n\nCompensation:\nThe anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $200,000-$220,000 (€170,000-€190,000). When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.\nBenefits for U.S.-based roles:\nCompetitive salary and generous company equity\n\nMedical, dental, and vision insurance - 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina\n\n42 days of paid time off, including:\n15 PTO days\n\n10 sick days\n\n15 company holidays\n\n2 floating holidays\n\nGenerous parental leave & fertility support\n\n401(k) retirement savings plan\n\nLifestyle spending account - $500/month to use however you’d like\n\nComplimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees\n\nOne Medical membership, and more!","description_format":"text","description_chars":4509,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Parental leave","Retirement plans","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Generative Video","Multimodal AI","Social Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-04-29T23:19:06Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.37,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":169,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T01:23:19Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1973,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6569},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6569"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcantina-machine-learning-engineer-tts-2"}]}