About Cantina:Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. We bring characters to life, transforming how people tell stories, connect, and create. We build and power ecosystems. 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!About the Role:As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the AI Image Generation (Imagine) team, you'll design, implement, fine tune, improve and debug the image AI models that power our lifelike AI bots. The Imagine Team at Cantina is responsible for all generative image and machine vision services. Your expertise in machine learning and scalable ML infrastructure will be crucial in developing innovative features that revolutionize how people connect and create online.AI bots on Cantina are multimodal and can text and talk with you as well as send you selfies. To provide these capabilities, we continually develop and deploy new image generation pipelines that create photorealistic, consistent characters.The Imagine team is constantly striving to improve the quality, character consistency, responsiveness to prompting, inference time, and incorporation of an ever increasing number of custom looks and appearance traits.What You’ll Do:Evaluate new image generation and identity preservation papers and models.Develop and deploy new versions of the image generation and image analysis pipelinesMonitor and fix production issues that impact usersFine-tune and optimize models to improve character consistency, prompt responsiveness, and inference latencyDesign and run experiments to benchmark model performance, tracking quality metrics across generations of pipeline improvementsCollaborate with cross-functional teams to translate product requirements into ML solutions and bring new generative features from prototype to productionWhat You’ll Bring:Demonstrated interest in AI image generation. This includes both personal and professional projectsDeep technical foundation in machine learning specifically in image synthesis5+ years experience as a software engineer, preferably in services2+ years of experience of building production-grade machine learning models in industry and/or academic research settingsStrong programming skills in Python and deploying Python based servicesFamiliarity with tools and frameworks involved in AI image generation including but not limited to Stable Diffusion, Diffusion Transformers (DiT), Visual Transformers (ViT), Tensorflow, PyTorch, Diffusers, ComfyUI, TensorRT, and CUDAExperience building end-to-end scalable ML infrastructure with on-premise or cloud platforms including Baseten, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) or AzureStrong teamwork skills including communication and collaboration with both technical and non-technical team membersCompensation:The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $200,000-$265,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.Benefits We Offer: Competitive salary and generous company equityMedical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina42 days of paid time off, including:15 PTO days10 sick days15 company holidays2 floating holidaysGenerous parental leave & fertility support401(k) retirement savings planLifestyle spending account – $500/month to use however you’d likeComplimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employeesOne Medical membership, and more!