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Research Scientist, Real-Time Video Generation

Cantina· Research
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EuropeFull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Research Scientist focused on real-time video generation for interactive characters, spanning realistic humans, stylized characters, and non-human identities. Responsibilities include developing real-time streaming generation, improving expression and motion, fine-tuning, distillation, inference optimization, data development, evaluation, and collaboration. Opportunity to propose directions and run a steady stream of experiments.

Responsibilities

  • Real-time and streaming generation. Develop models that support responsive interaction while maintaining visual quality and consistency over time. Investigate latency, continuity, and how model behavior changes during longer generation.
  • Character expression and motion. Explore how appearance, facial expression, gesture, and body movement come together into a coherent character. Improve the relationship between speech and motion across different identities and visual styles.
  • Fine-tuning and post-training. Adapt video models to new data, behaviors, and capabilities. Investigate training objectives and conditioning methods, and follow promising ideas through implementation and evaluation.
  • Distillation and inference optimization. Make generation faster and more efficient. Work across model-level approaches and runtime improvements, measuring their effects on quality, latency, and memory.
  • Data development. Spend meaningful time with the actual training examples. Identify missing coverage and recurring failure modes, improve curation and sampling, and develop data that helps models learn the behavior we want.
  • Evaluation. Build comparisons that make progress visible and failures understandable. Combine quantitative measurements with careful inspection of generated video and the experience of interacting with the model.
  • Research and collaboration. Read relevant work, reproduce and adapt useful ideas, and share early experiments, demos, and findings. Help the team decide what deserves more time and compute.

Qualifications

  • Experience training or fine-tuning video or related generative models.
  • Ability to learn unfamiliar methods quickly and turn ideas into useful experiments.
  • Good experimental judgment, ownership, and clear communication.

Skills

Required:Video or related generative modelsExperimentation and quick learningCommunication and ownership

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
  • Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
  • One Medical membership, and more!
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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