Head of Community Relations

Location: Los Angeles Workplace: Hybrid 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: We’re hiring a Head of Community Relations to build Cantina’s relationships with the AI filmmakers, character builders and creators shaping this medium. Their work will be central to how Cantina is introduced to the world and to how people discover and learn to use it afterward. You’ll build a program that gives creators good reasons to keep making work here: access to the team, useful tools, paid opportunities and recognition. You’ll also hire and lead the five-person team needed to run it. Three things are essential: - You love AI video. You have a current portfolio, understand the production workflow and can discuss the strengths and limits of the tools you use. - You already belong to this community. X is where this community gathers and where Cantina’s community work will be concentrated. You have an established presence in the AI video conversation on X and relationships with creators who trust you. You know whose work matters and can explain why. - You have built and scaled a creator program. You have managed budgets, incentives, payments and program rules, and led a program from dozens of participants to hundreds or thousands. You can show what the program produced and provide references from creators who took part. What else you bring: You have hired and managed people, organized creator events, run a Discord at scale, and handled contracts, payments and support. You follow through on commitments, communicate candidly when plans change and exercise sound judgment about paid promotion. Experience in a game-studio creator program, creator marketplace or revenue-sharing model is useful, as is another language spoken in a major AI video community. What you will lead: - Creator relationships. Help us build out the AI video and creator ecosystem around Cantina. Establish who are our Tier 1 creators and give them early access, credits and clear briefs while preserving their own voices. Establish a Creator Council and a direct working relationship with Product. The measure is simple: priority creators make their best work on Cantina, publish it first and in their own voices on X / YouTube, etc and keep doing so weekly. Earn that through the quality of the experience and the opportunities you deliver. - Community programs. X is the center of the program. Lead Cantina’s participation in the AI video conversation there: daily presence, substantive replies, surfacing creator work to the company account, regular Spaces and office hours, and the steady build of the company and executive accounts ahead of launch. Make Discord a useful home for support, learning and sharing work, with showcases and challenges that feed back onto X. Bring creators together at a launch gathering, meetups and relevant festivals. You should be comfortable hosting, appearing on camera and representing Cantina in person. - Creator incentives and opportunities. Design and run the Creator Fund, including payments based on eligible views after content review, a clear rate card, bonuses, credits, commissions and grants. Make recognition tangible through creator credit, spotlights and agreed distribution opportunities. You own the Fund and its budget, working with Growth on economics, Partnerships on talent agreements and Trust and Safety on review standards. Paid work must be disclosed, artificial engagement excluded, and payouts and promised opportunities delivered reliably. - Creator education. Build a useful library of tutorials and demonstrations with the education lead and commissioned creators. For meaningful releases, coordinate early creator access and aim to publish a demonstration and lesson within 24 hours. Show work that an ordinary user can reproduce in Cantina. Explain the process and disclose unusually involved workflows so viewers understand what the result requires. - Creator feedback. Bring Product a weekly, prioritized account of what creators need. Agree which improvements to pursue, explain decisions to the community and credit the people whose feedback shaped the work. Maintain a visible record of requests, decisions and delivery. The team and your partners: - You’ll recruit and lead a team covering X community relations; Discord and in-app community; creator education; creator-program operations; and program coordination. The team will handle daily relationships, education, reviews, payments and administration, with clear responsibilities and a shared calendar. - You’ll work closely with Social on publishing creator work and with Partnerships on talent and commercial relationships. Growth owns paid acquisition; Marketing owns brand, press and the company narrative; Trust and Safety sets policy. Your responsibility is to make the creator program work across those teams. What success looks like: We’ll agree your first-90-day milestones against your start date and the launch work already underway. The initial priorities are: - Community setup. Map the priority relationships, onboard the first forty creators, set up Discord and a reliable community calendar, convene the Council, and agree the incentive program’s rules and rate card. - Creator participation. Build toward one hundred onboarded creators, with launch goals of seventy publishing and thirty sharing a tutorial or completed piece. Establish the tutorial library, begin reviewed payouts and bring the first two community hires into the team. - Program growth. Work toward, weekly publishing by priority creators, a forty-lesson education library and the full team in place. Work with Product to deliver three agreed creator-requested improvements and credit the people whose feedback shaped them. Measure creator participation and retention, the quality and frequency of published work, creator posts on X mentioning Cantina each week, the share of launch-week attention coming from community accounts rather than company accounts, education output, Discord activity and referred registrations. Report program costs alongside results, including cost per creator-published piece and per referred registration. Compensation: The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $200,000-$250,000. 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!