Research Scientist

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

• Build and maintain scalable systems for ingesting, preprocessing, and delivering large-scale video data for model training
• Design and scale distributed data pipelines for preprocessing, dataset generation, and repeated dataset refreshes
• Own workflow orchestration, job scheduling, monitoring, and failure recovery for large-scale data processing jobs
• Implement and maintain containerized pipeline infrastructure using Kubernetes
• Optimize cloud-based data storage and movement across AWS, GCS, or Azure
• Research and develop distillation methods for large-scale diffusion and flow-based video generation models
• Develop reward models and preference-based fine-tuning pipelines to align video generation quality with human judgments
• Analyze the relationship between base model behavior and post-training outcomes

Requirements

• Strong experience building or scaling large-scale data systems for machine learning workflows
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks like PySpark or Ray
• Familiarity with orchestration tools such as Airflow
• Proficiency in containerization using Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud-based data storage and compute (AWS, GCS, or Azure)
• Familiarity with video processing tools such as FFmpeg, PyAV, DALI, or OpenCV
• Strong research background in post-training methods for large-scale diffusion or flow-based generative models
• Experience with reward modeling or preference-based fine-tuning (RLHF, DPO)
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch or JAX

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, or ECCV
• Track record of independent research from idea to experimental validation

Benefits

• Competitive salary and generous company equity
• Personal time off and paid holidays
• Health insurance
• Global travel insurance
• Monthly spending stipend of $500
• Home office equipment