Who we are

At Cantera we’re building the technology infrastructure to connect Latin American talent to the companies building the physical infrastructure that’ll power North America’s future.

We source, vet, and connect Latin American engineers and technical professionals with U.S. companies across data centers, energy generation and distribution, advanced manufacturing, and industrial construction, which all require on-site presence. We manage the full immigration and relocation process, and we’ve started with the TN visa for Mexican professionals.

The founding team came out of Stanford and Harvard. We’re Latin Americans that have lived in the U.S. We closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round in early 2026, have successfully placed dozens of engineers at some of the largest construction companies in the U.S., and we’re growing fast.

What you’ll do

As a member of the technical team at Cantera, you’ll build the backend systems that source, vet, and match candidates with U.S. employers, all workflows that use LLMs heavily. You’ll have ownership over a domain and the authority to make your own decisions. We're a small, high-agency team so the same engineer often takes a feature end-to-end, so comfort touching the frontend is a real plus. You’ll also pick up work outside the scope when it makes sense. You’ll report to one of the co-founders.

Here’s examples of work you might take on:

• Build the context layer to connect candidate ingestion, AI-driven interviews, ranked search, client interviews, candidate communication, and outcomes.

• Design how we represent a candidate to employers and how that representation gets richer as employers and candidates interact with our platform.

• Build the matching layer that pairs candidates with open roles, combining structured candidate information and semantic signals from interviews and clients.

• Ship internal tools that our recruiting team uses every day: search, triage, filtering of candidates.

• Own search and ranking end-to-end, including retrieval quality, latency, and the feedback loop from user signals.

Who you are

We’re building a high-agency engineering team of people who care about their craft. The codebase is mostly TypeScript and React, but we hire for the engineer, not the stack, so we don’t require experience in specific frameworks or languages.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering or comparable experience

• Strong software engineering skills with the ability to write high quality code

• 2-12+ years of professional hands-on software development experience, able to write well-factored algorithms and well-designed systems

• Strong backend engineering skills with either experience or curiosity in front-end.

• You communicate clearly in English, in writing and in person. Slack, meetings, and PRs may run in English, so you should be comfortable working in that environment.

You’ll be a great fit if:

• You get energy from working in high-performance environments — you should expect that of us and we’ll expect it of you

• You take ownership and enjoy the responsibility that entails, because in an early-stage startup you’ll be making foundational decisions continuously

• You’re curious and motivated to figure things out amid ambiguity

• You connect with the mission: enabling millions of talented people to access life-changing opportunities

Location

• Based in Mexico City or willing to relocate there. This role is CDMX-based

What we offer

• Base salary scales with experience. We pay towards the top of the Mexican market for engineers at your level

• Equity participation: you will be an early employee with meaningful upside

• Significant ownership building out the technology stack and team as Cantera grows

• An environment where you can use modern tools to supercharge your own engineering work

• Direct access to and mentorship from the founding team