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 an iOS Engineer at Cantina, you’ll lead the development of innovative, high-performance features — from crafting personalized feeds and immersive custom UIs to empowering bots with AI-driven capabilities like chatting, text-to-speech, voice selection, image creation, and real-time media effects.

Working closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Sean Parker, you’ll influence the direction of a product central to the company’s mission, move quickly to deliver impactful updates, and enjoy the autonomy to bring your ideas to life.

We’re looking for someone who thrives on pushing the limits of iOS development and has a passion for creating visually stunning, high-performance experiences. Your expertise in custom graphics, animation frameworks, and media pipelines will help shape the creative foundation of our flagship app, elevating both user experience and innovation in the social AI space.

What You’ll Do:

Work with frameworks and technologies like UIKit, AVFoundation, Combine, Core Animation, and more.
Lead development of new AI and media-driven features.
Build and optimize video/audio pipelines, real-time media effects, and AI-powered visual features.
Participate in Architecture meetings to help ensure our apps meet the highest quality standards.
Collaborate with Product, Design, and QA teams to deliver polished, scalable experiences.
Take ownership of features — be part of a small team that ships an application to a large user base.
Be part of an incredibly supportive team that values feedback, both positive and career-growth oriented.

What You’ll Bring:

8+ years of experience developing iOS applications, or equivalent education.
Fluency in Swift, UIKit, and Objective-C, with a strong foundation in custom graphics and animation frameworks.
Ability to write readable, maintainable, documented, and thoroughly tested code.
Experience developing integrations with RESTful APIs.
Proficiency with Git and version control workflows.
Basic understanding of Figma — able to determine spacing and sizing; bonus if you can export icons and understand variables.
Experience with video editing, real-time media effects, or AI-driven media features is a plus.
Ability to effectively translate Product, UX, and UI requirements into code.
Skilled at evaluating and communicating engineering solutions and trade-offs to teammates and potentially non-technical stakeholders.
Can create scalable and reusable components that are flexible and modular.
Attention to detail, motion, and animation.

Compensation:

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $180,000-$240,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

Benefits:

Competitive salary and generous company equity
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!

About the company

Cantina is an invitation-only platform that blends social gaming with artificial intelligence in a 24/7 virtual club called The Cantina. Members subscribe to access features that let them add AI bots with distinct personalities, chat, play games, and even generate AI art, with bot behavior adapting to user inputs. The service differentiates itself through a private, personalized, dynamic experience that combines human–AI interaction with user-generated content in a shared space. Its goal is to build a steady, subscription-based platform that appeals to tech-savvy users and brands by delivering ongoing, customized digital interactions.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series B

Total Funding

$33.3M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2014

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

Cantina raised $8 million on July 30, 2026, reaching $16.5 million total.
August 26, 2026 releases added Claude Code telemetry, MCP inventory, and Slack approvals.
Cantina now serves healthcare, fintech, and Fortune 500 customers, expanding enterprise credibility.

What critics are saying

Framework Ventures is the only named July 2026 investor, limiting investor diversity.
Wiz, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, and Aikido crowd the same agentic security category.
If Clarion misses remediation speed, customers will keep buying point tools instead.

What makes Cantina unique

Clarion moves security from discovery to verified resolution, launched July 30, 2026.
Apex performs autonomous offensive security, writing fixes and opening pull requests.
Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program access gives Cantina privileged model capability for cyber workflows.

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Benefits

Health Insurance
Paid Vacation
Paid Sick Leave
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match
Parental Leave
Fertility Treatment Support
Company Equity
Home Office Stipend
Flexible Work Hours
Hybrid Work Options

Company News

Harro

May 24th, 2026

MC&V adds Canva and Canteen to client roster.

MC&V adds Canva and Canteen to client roster. AI-native production company MC&V has secured two new client wins: Canva and Canteen, adding them to its roster. The wins reflect growing demand from global brands and culturally led organisations for AI production partners with experience delivering quality and efficiency in commercial production environments. The appointments build on existing relationships, with MC&V founders Marie-Céline Merret Wirström and Vinne Schifferstein Vidal having previously worked with Canteen and Canva. AI moves from experimentation to production. The client wins come as brands move AI from experimentation into real campaign production. MC&V said the challenge is no longer simply generating content, but designing production workflows that can hold up commercially, legally and operationally. That includes questions around IP, ownership, approvals, governance and production feasibility. Vidal said the real value now lies in knowing how to turn AI tools into work that can perform for brands and agencies. "Right now, almost everyone has access to the same AI tools, but what's becoming more valuable is knowing how to turn those tools into work that holds up creatively and commercially," Vidal said. "The tools have progressed incredibly quickly, but direction, craft and experience with brand production still matter enormously. That's the thinking behind MC&V. "We're building around people who understand storytelling, production and how to deliver work properly for brands and agencies." New AI director roster. Founded earlier this year, MC&V positions itself as an AI-native production company built around workflow design, creative direction and production systems. The company brings more than two years of experience delivering AI campaigns for brands including Adidas, Uniqlo, KFC and Afterpay. As part of its expansion, MC&V has added AI directors Jodie Heenan, Josef "Seppi" Scholler and Jagger Waters to its creative roster. Heenan is an Australian-based AI artist with a background in design, motion and VFX. She is also Creative Director of her own company and has worked with brands including Cadbury and Twinings. Scholler is known for cinematic visual style, hybrid production and AI-driven world-building, combining emotional scenery with generative workflows. Waters is a multidisciplinary AI creator, writer and producer with more than a decade of experience across film, audio, live events and digital storytelling. Production thinking becomes critical. MC&V co-founder Marie-Céline Merret Wirström said the shift to AI-native workflows is changing what production requires. "Production is becoming less about departments and more about how you design the workflow around the idea and bring the best talent around the brief," Merret Wirström said. "Clients are asking different questions now. Not just what AI can do, but how it fits into their process, their approvals and how it scales. That's where production thinking becomes critical." MC&V will continue to build its offering across hybrid production, AI-assisted creative development, and fully AI-native campaign execution, working with agencies and brands to design production pipelines that balance creative ambition with commercial realities. Top image: (L to R) - Marie-Céline Merret, Jagger Waters, Josef Scholler, Jodie Herman, Vinne Schifferstein.

Cantina

iOS Engineer - Senior-Staff Levels

About the job