[Hiring] Machine Learning Engineer - Voice Conversion @Cantina

Role Description

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 VC and adjacent tasks (controllable TTS, voice design 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.

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 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.
• Eager to learn every day, find and solve unique large-scale problems.

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.
• 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.
• Safety & Responsibility: Contribute to safety/consent guardrails and to misuse/abuse mitigation for responsible speech technology.

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.

Compensation

The 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.

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!