[Hiring] Machine Learning Engineer, Speech - Joint Audio-Video Modeling @Cantina

Role Description

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)
• The conditioning and alignment machinery that makes characters speak, sing, and emote in sync with what's on screen

This includes:

• Voice cloning and multi-speaker conditioning inside joint AV models
• Cinematic dialogue with music and sound design
• 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 staying inside audio
• Are results-oriented, flexible, and willing to pick up whatever moves the needle
• Like collaborating closely with infra, data, and product to ship measurable improvements
• Enjoy designing experiments, listening tests, and metrics that correlate with user-perceived quality
• Are eager to learn every day, and to find and solve unique large-scale problems

Qualifications

• Exceptional research/development experience with large-scale audio models (>8B parameters, >500k hours of data)
• Deep hands-on experience with diffusion and/or flow-matching transformers, including practical knowledge of samplers, schedules, conditioning mechanisms, and distillation
• Deep hands-on experience training audio VAEs, neural audio codecs, and vocoders latent/tokenizer design, reconstruction and perceptual objectives, adversarial training
• Strong experience with multi-node, multi-GPU distributed training (FSDP/DeepSpeed or equivalent)
• 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 or multimodal generative models to production
• Background in working with large-scale ML data, and the ability to iterate on data and triangulate quality using both subjective and objective signals
• Experience with voice cloning, speech control/steerability, or expressive speech generation
• Notable publications and/or open-source contributions in speech/audio/ML

Requirements

• Experience with multimodal audio-video modeling: joint AV generation of multi-shot, multi-speaker scenes with dialogue, music, and sound design generated jointly with video, and the cross-modal alignment that keeps them in sync
• Experience with video generation: video diffusion/flow-matching transformers, video VAEs, conditioned and multi-shot generation, building data pipelines for video models
• Streaming or real-time generation, causal distillation (e.g., Self Forcing / Self Forcing++)

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!