Prompt Engineer

About the Company

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.

Responsibilities

• Define and author core behavior system prompts that shape how Cantina bots express personality, emotion, dialect, and social behavior
• Identify key personality traits and create datasets and prompt structures to reproduce them
• Prototype new bot traits and product features through prompt engineering and iteration
• Collaborate with research to build and maintain behavioral evaluations
• Partner with product, design, and engineering to translate creative intent into scalable prompt systems
• Review, refine, and evolve prompts for production
• Track emerging issues in bot behavior and drive prompt-level solutions
• Document model quirks, prompting strategies, and guidelines
• Support research and ML by delivering meta-prompts for synthetic data pipelines

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in prompt engineering and developing LLM-based features end-to-end
• Strong experience writing, testing, and iterating on complex multi-step and system-level prompts
• Deep understanding of LLM capabilities, limitations, and quirks
• Experience creating datasets and evaluating model outputs
• Strong grounding in psychology, sociology, linguistics, or related fields
• Methodical, hypothesis-driven approach to experimentation
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives and operate independently in fast-moving environments
• Excellent communication skills for technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Basic Python familiarity and comfort navigating codebases

Benefits

• Competitive salary and generous company equity
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered
• 42 days of paid time off (15 PTO, 10 sick, 15 holidays, 2 floating)
• Generous parental leave & fertility support
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• Lifestyle spending account – $500/month
• Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
• One Medical membership