Media Software Engineer, Speech (Senior-Staff Levels)

Sunnyvale · Remotefull timeRemote

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senior

$180k–$270k

H1B: yes

Cantina The Media Software Engineer at Cantina improves real-time speech and media systems powering live AI conversations. This role focuses on reducing latency, optimizing audio streaming, and extending WebRTC infrastructure across multiple platforms.

Responsibilities

The Media Team at Cantina is building the real-time infrastructure powering live conversations between people and AI characters. Our goal is simple to express, but challenging to make real: enabling fast, natural, and truly conversational interaction with diverse and creative characters.
We’re looking for a Software Engineer to help improve the speech, audio, and media systems at the heart of the Cantina experience.
This team’s responsibilities cover low-level media processing pipelines, integration with internal and external models for speech recognition and synthesis, and globally distributed, WebRTC-based infrastructure supporting real-time voice and video interactions across iOS, Android, and web.
If you’re excited by high-performance C++, real-time systems, speech technologies, and building the future of conversational AI, we’d love to talk.
Improve the real-time speech and media systems powering live AI conversations.
Reduce latency and optimize responsiveness across audio streaming and speech pipelines.
Build tools to enable the creation of AI models to support speech processing.
Develop new voice and video capabilities that enable more immersive interactions between users and AI bots.
Improve and extend our custom WebRTC infrastructure across iOS, Android, and web.
What You’ll Bring:

Qualification

BS or MS in Computer ScienceExcellent communications skillsExposure to system programming conceptsPrevious experience with WebRTC

Required

BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent experience.
3+ years of experience working as a software engineer.
Excellent communications skills.
Demonstrated ability to work independently to drive projects from requirements to completion.
Experience with C or C++ in a professional context.
Grounding in computer science fundamentals, including memory management, high-performance data structures, and concurrent / multithreaded systems.
Exposure to system programming concepts, including network protocol design, asynchronous I/O, and distributed system architectures..
Object-oriented development and design skills.
Interest in solving subtle and challenging engineering problems.

Preferred

Previous experience with WebRTC, streaming protocols, or other media-adjacent technologies.
Familiarity with media processing techniques..
Experience creating backend server infrastructure.
Experience developing software for iOS or Android.
Familiarity with building services using Node.js or Go.
Familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, particularly in relation to speech recognition and synthesis.