Staff Software Engineer, Platform

📋 Job Overview

About Cantina Labs: 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 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.

🎯 The Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will establish a foundation that accelerates product development by building reusable, scalable, and high-quality components that empower our engineering teams. You will focus on long-term strategic investments in core capabilities, abstracting common product concepts into shared services and improving the overall developer experience to ensure a foundation for future product growth.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design and build core services and product platform components, such as entities and relationship systems, to be used across the engineering organization.
• Develop and maintain search infrastructure, including search indexes and relevance systems.
• Oversee DevOps initiatives, managing AWS usage, Terraform configurations, infrastructure upgrades, and platform observability to ensure stability and scalability.
• Own and continuously improve the developer experience by optimizing the backend repository and Go stack to increase iteration speed.
• Provide consulting and mentorship to other engineering teams, promoting best practices and guiding the adoption of new platform technologies.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on building foundation-level platform services and infrastructure.
• Extensive experience with AWS, Terraform, and infrastructure-as-code for managing large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep proficiency in Go and backend architectures, with a focus on creating reusable frameworks and tools.
• Strong understanding of developer productivity metrics and experience improving internal iteration cycles for engineering teams.
• Experience with search infrastructure, indexing strategies, and observability platforms.
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to lead cross-cutting initiatives and consult on architectural decisions.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive salary and generous company equity
The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $200,000 - $240,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina
42 days of paid time off, including:
15 PTO days
10 sick days
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!

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Remote (U.S. or Canada)