17 hours ago
Base Salary
$250k - $320k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture and roadmap for search and recommendations, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, search, discovery, home feed, trending, and creator leaderboards.
- Define relevance metrics, build offline evaluation and golden-set tooling, and run online experiments to determine whether ranking changes ship.
- Design and evolve ranking systems, engagement-signal pipelines, freshness and decay models, index-time signals, and live query-time re-ranking.
- Own OpenSearch in production, including index and mapping design, reindexing and cutover safety, query performance, cost, and cluster capacity.
- Build candidate generation and personalization for recommendation surfaces and partner with Data and ML on feature pipelines and models.
- Collaborate with Product and Trust & Safety on quality gates, cold-start behavior, and recommendation safety constraints.
- Establish instrumentation, flag-gated rollouts, and runbooks, and serve as the technical point of contact for discovery across backend teams.
- Mentor engineers whose work touches search and recommendations.
Requirements
- 10+ years of production software development experience with substantial depth in search, ranking, recommendations, or ML-driven relevance for a consumer-scale product.
- Hands-on production search-engine expertise with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Vespa, or a similar system, including index and analyzer design, relevance tuning, and cluster operations.
- Experience owning offline evaluation, golden sets, and A/B or interleaving frameworks, with the ability to explain metric changes and their causes.
- Fluency with candidate generation, feature pipelines, embedding retrieval, re-ranking, and the serving constraints affecting online performance.
- Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals, production experience in Go or a comparable systems language, and familiarity with SQL warehouses and streaming and batch pipelines.
- Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous technical areas without a dedicated owner, including prioritization and measurable outcomes.
- Clear written communication and sound judgment when balancing relevance, freshness, safety, and latency with Product.
- Preferred experience with AI-generated or rapidly growing content catalogs, severe cold-start conditions, or ranking under trust-and-safety constraints.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and generous company equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina.
- 42 days of paid time off, including 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays.
- Generous parental leave and fertility support.
- 401(k) retirement savings plan.
- $500 per month lifestyle spending account.
- Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees.
- One Medical membership.
- The posting indicates benefits and perks for in-office employees but does not otherwise specify a remote or hybrid work arrangement.
Categories
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.