Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. Cantina, our flagship social AI platform, is just the beginning. If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future Cantina is a place where people create AI characters and the videos those characters star in, and the catalog grows far faster than anyone can browse. Search and recommendations are what turn that catalog into a product: they decide which characters a current user meets in their first minute, which creators get discovered, and what appears in every feed, leaderboard, and discovery surface we ship. We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own that area end to end — retrieval, ranking, relevance quality, and the roadmap for all three. This is the first dedicated hire for search and recommendations, so you will inherit a real production system serving live traffic along with a large amount of unclaimed ground, and you will set the technical direction rather than execute someone else’s. Make relevance a measured discipline rather than an opinion: define the quality metrics per surface, build the offline evaluation and golden-set tooling, and run the online experiments that decide whether a ranking change ships. Design and evolve the ranking stack — engagement signal pipelines, decay and freshness models, and the pattern we use to combine pre-computed index-time signals with live re-ranking at query time. Own OpenSearch in production: index and mapping design, reindex and cutover safety, query performance, cost, and the operational headroom of the clusters behind every discovery surface.



Build candidate generation and personalization for recommendation surfaces, and partner with data and ML on the feature pipelines and models behind them. Work directly with Product and Trust & Safety on what “good” means for each surface — quality gates, cold-start behavior for brand-new creators and characters, and what must never be recommended. Act as the technical point of contact for discovery across backend teams, and mentor the engineers whose work touches it. 10+ years building production software, with substantial depth in search, ranking, recommendations, or ML-driven relevance on a consumer-scale product. ~ Fluency across the recommender stack — candidate generation, feature pipelines, embedding retrieval, re-ranking — and a working understanding of the serving constraints that make an offline win fail online. ~ Strong distributed systems and backend fundamentals, with production experience in Go or a comparable systems language, and comfort in the data layer behind it (SQL warehouses, streaming and batch pipelines). ~ Preferred: experience with AI-generated or rapidly growing content catalogs, severe cold-start conditions, or ranking under trust-and-safety constraints. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data. Competitive salary and generous company equity ~ Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina ~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

📌 Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search (Canada)
🏢 Cantina
📍 Canada