Prompt Engineer

What You’ll Do

• Define and author core behavior system prompts that shape how Cantina bots express personality, emotion, dialect, and social behavior across text, voice, image, and video.
• Identify key personality traits that make AI personas compelling, and create datasets and prompt structures that reliably reproduce those traits.
• Prototype new bot traits and product features through prompt engineering and iterate based on qualitative and quantitative evaluation.
• Balance short-term feature development with long-term behavioral consistency and quality across the Cantina ecosystem.
• Collaborate with research to build and maintain behavioral evaluations that measure bot performance, personality fidelity, and interaction quality over time.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering to translate creative intent and user feedback into scalable prompt systems.
• Review, refine, and evolve prompts as they move into production, helping establish best practices and launch criteria.
• Track emerging issues in bot behavior, prioritize improvements, and drive prompt-level solutions in ambiguous or high-impact areas.
• Document model quirks, prompting strategies, and guidelines to scale prompt development across teams.
• Support research and ML in our training efforts by delivering meta-prompts for our synthetic data pipelines and evaluating new model behavior.

What You’ll Bring

• 3+ years of experience prompt engineering and developing LLM-based features end-to-end.
• Strong experience writing, testing, and iterating on complex multi-step and system-level prompts.
• Deep understanding of LLM capabilities, limitations, and quirks, with strong intuition for how input design shapes model behavior.
• Experience creating datasets and evaluating model outputs in collaboration with ML or product teams.
• Strong grounding in psychology, sociology, linguistics, or related fields as they relate to personality, behavior, and dialect.
• Methodical, hypothesis-driven approach to experimentation and iteration.
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives, prioritize effectively, and operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain prompt design decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable communicating with executive-level stakeholders.
• Basic Python familiarity and comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases.

Compensation

Anticipated annual base salary range: $150,000-$180,000.

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