Technical Program Manager, Product Experience Location Redwood City, CA Employment Type Full time Department Product Compensation $200K – $300K 🩺 Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution 🍼 New parents, we've got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey Overview Application Character.AI is looking for a high-leverage, force-multiplying Technical Program Manager (TPM) to partner directly with our Chief Product Officer (CPO). In this role, you will operate across the entire product and design purview of the CPO to ensure our core development engines run seamlessly. This is not a traditional, rigid corporate TPM role. We are looking for someone with "fixer energy"—a relentless, high-agency problem-solver who possesses a founder's mindset, exceptional execution skills, and the technical weight to act as a core operational extension of the CPO. You will be the ultimate guardian of momentum: chasing down engineering bottlenecks, optimizing cross-functional roadmaps, and ensuring team velocity scales alongside our technology. Key Responsibilities Operational Rigor & Technical Execution Keep the Trains Running on Time: Own the end-to-end execution of major initiatives under the CPO's umbrella, ensuring critical product, design, and engineering milestones are hit without friction. Eliminate Blockers: Proactively manage cross-functional dependencies across product, design, and engineering teams. Your primary metric of success is that development is never left stalling for information or decisions. Drive Accountability: Attend weekly core team meetings, capture critical technical notes, synthesize action items, and relentlessly chase down owners to ensure rigorous follow-through. Process Evolution: Analyze how teams are currently working and design/implement lightweight, scalable processes to improve cross-functional execution across the software development life cycle (SDLC). Strategic Alignment & Technical Delivery Product & Design Sync: Build deep context on the CPO's vision and product strategy to seamlessly bridge the gap between creative design concepts and technical implementation. Unstructured Problem Solving: Roll up your sleeves to solve ambiguous, complex technical or operational problems that don't neatly fall into a single team's bucket. AI-Driven Workflows: Actively leverage AI tools (like Gemini) to optimize team workflows, ensure project knowledge is captured efficiently, and explore agentic workflows to enhance team intelligence. Who You Are Founder Energy & High Agency: You possess extreme ownership. You don't wait to be told what to do—you see a gap, you fill it, and you autonomously solve problems. Execution Machine: You have a strong background in technical program management, product management, or an intensive technical operations role where you have successfully navigated fast-moving tech roadmaps. High Cognitive Agility: You can pivot from a deep-dive technical alignment with engineers to high-level roadmap prioritization with design and product leaders in the span of an hour. Relentless Communicator: You are crisp, direct, and excellent at synthesis. You know how to get to the point quickly and ensure information flows seamlessly across the organization. AI-Curious: You have a genuine fascination with artificial intelligence and are eager to experiment with cutting-edge tools to optimize operational efficiency. Qualifications & Background We care far more about your capability, trajectory, and "fixer energy" than a rigid checklist of past titles. You might be an incredible fit if you are a: Technical Program Manager (TPM) or Product Manager (PM) looking for a highly impactful, executive-facing execution role. Experience enabling product/design teams to become "AI-ready" is a major plus. Former Founder who loves the early-to-mid stage tech grind but wants to focus heavily on hyper-scale execution and organizational stability. Management Consulting Alum (particularly from technical or digital practices) with a proven track record of intensive work, extreme attention to detail, and cross-functional influence. Seasoned Operational Leader—a highly capable, mature operator who brings stability, structured execution, and mentorship to a fast-growing team. About Character.AI Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination. Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures. In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach. Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI! At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success. Apply for this Job Powered by Privacy PolicySecurityVulnerability Disclosure

Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.

Engineering

78 days ago

Principal Research Engineer, Post-Training

Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States

Pay

$275k–400k

Setting

On-site

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Principal Research Engineer, Post-Training Location Redwood City, CA Employment Type Full time Department Technical Staff - ML Compensation $275K – $400K 🩺 Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution 🍼 New parents, we've got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey Overview Application About the Role and Team As a Principal Research Engineer on the Post-Training team, you will drive the technical vision, execution, and evolution of the systems that transform foundation models into intelligent, engaging, and aligned products. Specifically, your team focuses on post-training of top-tier OSS LLMs (such as Mistral and Qwen) to power the highly immersive role-playing chat features of Character.AI. You will lead initiatives spanning data, algorithms, infrastructure, and evaluation, helping define how our models learn from feedback and improve over time. This is a highly cross-functional role that combines deep technical expertise with organizational leadership. You will partner closely with researchers, engineers, product teams, and infrastructure teams to identify the highest-leverage opportunities for improving model performance and user experience. Your work will directly shape the conversational experiences of millions of users every day. At Character.AI, you will have the opportunity to influence both the direction of our research and the systems that bring it into production, helping build the next generation of AI entertainment. What You'll Do Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Define and drive the technical roadmap for mid- and post-training systems, balancing research innovation with production reliability and scalability. You will mentor and grow a team of researchers and engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, and career development. Establish best practices for experimentation, model development, and deployment. Research & Model Development: Lead the development of alignment algorithms, optimization techniques, and training objectives to improve model capabilities and data efficiency. Drive advances in mid- and post-training methodologies including reinforcement learning, preference optimization, supervised fine-tuning, and emerging alignment approaches. Identify and execute high-impact research opportunities that improve model behavior, safety, and user engagement. Develop robust evaluation frameworks and quality signals to measure real-world model performance. Systems & Infrastructure: Lead the design of efficient training and inference systems for large-scale generative models. Architect scalable data pipelines that transform diverse data sources into high-quality training datasets. Partner with infrastructure teams to optimize distributed training, GPU utilization, and serving efficiency. Drive improvements in experimentation platforms, data quality systems, and model observability. Who You Are (Required Qualifications) PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience. Significant experience leading technical projects or teams in machine learning, AI research, or large-scale distributed systems. Experience scaling and mentoring high-performing research and engineering teams. Deep understanding of modern machine learning techniques, including transformers, reinforcement learning, alignment methods, and large language models. Strong track record of delivering impactful research or applied ML systems in production environments. Expertise in designing, building, and maintaining production-quality ML systems and infrastructure. Experience training, serving, debugging, and optimizing large-scale models on GPU-based systems. Experience leading teams working on large language model training, mid-training, or post-training. Experience with product experimentation, online evaluation, and A/B testing frameworks. Strong software engineering skills with the ability to write clean, maintainable, and scalable code. Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams. Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives across data, training infrastructure, evaluation, and model serving. Nice to Have Hands-on experience working directly with open-source models like Mistral and Qwen, particularly adapting them via mid- and post-training for specific personas, creative writing, or role-playing applications. Familiarity with cloud-native ML infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Docker, and modern orchestration platforms. Publications in leading machine learning conferences or demonstrated contributions to the broader AI community. About Character.AI Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination. Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures. In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach. Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI! At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success. Apply for this Job Powered by Privacy PolicySecurityVulnerability Disclosure

Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.

Video Games

99 days ago

Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment

Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States

Pay

$220k–260k

Setting

On-site

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Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment Location Redwood City, CA Employment Type Full time Department Safety Compensation $220K – $260K 🩺 Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution 🍼 New parents, we've got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey Overview Application About the role Model Alignment and Deployment is a critical, cross-functional effort spanning our Post-Training, Safety Engineering, Trust & Safety, ML Infra/Model Serving, and User Experience Research (UXR) teams. Together, these groups are responsible for transforming powerful pretrained language models into intelligent, engaging, safely aligned, and highly scalable products—working across data, compute, algorithms, infrastructure, and user insights to improve model performance and ensure reliable delivery. As a Technical Program Manager, you will be the operational and programmatic backbone connecting these teams: driving clarity, structure, and execution across some of the most technically complex and high-stakes work at Character.AI. This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of research, safety, user experience, and production. You'll partner closely with research engineers, safety experts, data scientists, infrastructure engineers, and UX researchers to turn ambitious model development goals into well-scoped, well-tracked, cross-functional programs. You will ensure that the data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, alignment workflows, and serving infrastructure underpinning our models are moving fast and moving well. You'll operate effectively in high-ambiguity environments, anticipate risks before they become blockers, and bring the kind of technical fluency needed to earn trust with researchers while communicating clearly to leadership. What you’ll do Program ownership: Lead planning and execution of cross-functional programs spanning data collection, annotation pipelines, alignment workflows (RLHF, DPO, Constitutional AI), safety guardrails (adversarial testing, red-teaming), and model serving. Establish scopes, goals, timelines, risks, and success metrics. Cross-functional coordination: Serve as the connective tissue between Post-Training, Safety Engineering, Trust & Safety, ML Infra, UXR, and Product. Translate model development, safety, and user experience priorities into executable roadmaps, keeping tightly coupled workstreams aligned from post-training through to production deployment. Evaluation & quality: Develop and maintain custom evaluation frameworks to track model performance and user satisfaction. Drive comprehensive quality evaluation initiatives alongside rigorous safety and toxicity baselines. Partner with UXR, researchers, and engineers to identify quality signals, incorporate human feedback, and surface actionable insights on model behavior in production. Operational excellence: Drive visibility into data pipeline health, annotation quality, training run progress, and deployment readiness. Identify bottlenecks across teams and lead efforts to improve tooling, process, and developer velocity. Strategic partnership: Partner with research, safety, product, and UXR leadership on prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs—balancing aggressive capability scaling with strict safety requirements, user needs, and infrastructure constraints. Process development: Build and refine the operational patterns, ontologies, and frameworks used to scale new capability development—from prompt engineering and data generation to model behavior specification and safety guidelines. Vendor & partner management: Own external partner relationships supporting these workstreams, including general and safety-focused annotation vendors, evaluation tooling providers, and data partners. What you’ll bring 5+ years of experience in technical program management, research operations, or product execution in a fast-moving AI, ML, or research environment. Deep familiarity with post-training and alignment concepts (supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, AI safety frameworks, LLM evaluation) as well as model deployment/serving, sufficient to engage substantively with both research and infrastructure engineers. Proven ability to lead complex, multi-team programs in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments; track record of shipping with quality and speed. Strong analytical mindset; comfortable working with data and user insights to measure program health, identify trends, and drive decisions. Proficiency in SQL and Python. Exceptional communication skills - able to translate deep technical work into clear narratives for leadership, and to hold detailed technical conversations with engineers across different disciplines. Obsessive about data integrity, operational rigor, and process quality without letting process slow teams down. BS in a quantitative, scientific, or technical field; MS or PhD a plus. Nice to have: Hands-on experience with data pipelines, annotation platforms, ML evaluation tooling, or human-in-the-loop workflows. Experience managing annotation vendors or external data partners. Familiarity with distributed training, experiment tracking, or ML infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud) and model serving systems. Prior experience embedded in an AI research team, foundation model lab, or Trust & Safety engineering team. Direct experience managing AI safety, trust, quality eval, or red-teaming programs. About Character.AI Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination. Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures. In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach. Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI! At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success. Apply for this Job Powered by Privacy PolicySecurityVulnerability Disclosure

Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.

Video Games

141 days ago

Technical Program Manager, AI Infrastructure

Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States

Pay

$220k–260k

Setting

Hybrid

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Technical Program Manager, AI Infrastructure Location Redwood City, CA Employment Type Full time Location Type Hybrid Department Safety Compensation $220K – $260K • Offers Equity 🩺 Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution 🍼 New parents, we've got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey Overview Application About the Role We’re hiring a Technical Program Manager, AI Infrastructure to lead high-impact programs that power Character.AI’s model development and serving systems at scale. In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering, research, and product teams to shape infrastructure strategy, align roadmaps, and drive end-to-end execution for critical initiatives across training, evaluation, and inference. You’ll help ensure our systems are reliable, efficient, and capable of supporting rapid iteration as we scale AI experiences to millions of users. This role is a good match for someone who thrives in technically complex environments, enjoys bringing structure to ambiguous problem spaces, and can drive alignment across deeply cross-functional teams. You’ll often operate at the intersection of research and production, helping teams navigate tradeoffs between speed, quality, and reliability. You should be comfortable influencing without authority, anticipating risks early, and keeping large, interdependent efforts moving forward. What You’ll Do Lead planning and execution of major AI infrastructure initiatives spanning training pipelines, data systems, model evaluation, and inference/serving Build structures that keep teams aligned: scopes, goals, requirements, timelines, risks, and success metrics Partner with engineering, research, and product to translate model and product needs into infrastructure roadmaps and priorities Drive cross-functional accountability and communication across teams working on tightly coupled systems Track key infrastructure metrics (e.g., reliability, latency, throughput, cost efficiency) and define reporting that surfaces progress and risk Identify bottlenecks in infrastructure workflows and lead efforts to improve tooling, automation, and developer velocity Support capacity planning and resource allocation to ensure infrastructure scales with model and product growth Develop repeatable frameworks and operational patterns that improve execution quality across infrastructure programs Serve as a strategic partner to leaders on prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs across infrastructure investments. Work closely with AI cloud providers and serve as the primary bridge between internal engineering teams and external partnership efforts. Technical understanding of GPU clusters, AI accelerator chips, and cloud providers to effectively evaluate requirements and guide infrastructure decisions. What You’ll Bring 5–8 years of experience in program management, technical operations, or product execution in a fast-moving, technical environment Proven ability to lead complex, multi-team initiatives spanning engineering and infrastructure systems Strong communication skills with the ability to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders Experience working closely with engineering teams on distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or platform development Ability to break down ambiguous problem spaces into clear plans and drive alignment across teams Analytical mindset with experience using data to inform decisions and measure impact Strong ownership and execution mindset, with the ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously About Character.AI Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination. Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures. In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach. Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI! At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success. Apply for this Job Powered by Privacy PolicySecurityVulnerability Disclosure

Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.

Engineering

217 days ago

Staff Data Scientist, Monetization

Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States

Pay

$250k–300k

Setting

Hybrid

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About the Role:

Character.AI is building the future of open-ended interactions between people and intelligent agents. As our platform scales, so does the opportunity to build sustainable, user-aligned monetization through subscriptions, advertising, and virtual currency economies.

We are seeking a Staff Data Scientist to partner closely with product, engineering, and growth teams to scale and optimize Character.AI’s monetization systems. This role focuses on enabling teams to design, launch, and iterate on data-informed, user-centric monetization experiences, while shaping how we measure, experiment with, and grow revenue without compromising the creativity and openness that define Character.AI.

What you’ll do:

You will partner closely with product and engineering teams to drive data-informed monetization across subscriptions, advertising, and virtual currency economies. This role defines success metrics, leads experimentation, and translates complex behavioral and economic data into actionable insights, while building the data science foundations needed to support rapid product iteration and long-term growth.

Qualifications:

7+ years of experience as a Data Scientist working on consumer-facing products, ideally in chat, social, UGC, or entertainment platforms
Strong intuition for identifying the right questions and quickly driving to high-impact insights
Proven ability to turn analysis into product decisions and shipped outcomes
Comfortable working in fast-moving, experimental environments with incomplete data
Experience building or scaling data science practices, including experimentation, metrics, and analytics tooling

You will be a good fit if you have:

Direct experience supporting monetization systems, including:
- Subscriptions and pricing
- Advertising or ad marketplaces
- Virtual currencies, economies, or gamified monetization
Background in consumer B2C products and/or B2B marketplaces

$150k–300k

Setting

Hybrid

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Software Engineer, Monetization Location Redwood City, CA Employment Type Full time Location Type Hybrid Department Technical Staff - Engineering Compensation $150K – $300K • Offers Equity 🩺 Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution 🍼 New parents, we've got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey Overview Application About the Role We are scaling personalized AI to billions of users and monetization is at the core of making this vision sustainable. Our monetization team is reimagining how users interact with virtual currency, subscriptions, and premium features in ways that feel intuitive, rewarding, and fun. We’re looking for a product engineer who thrives at the intersection of core product, commerce, and user experience—someone excited to design and build systems that not only drive revenue but also enhance user delight. If you have experience with subscriptions, ads, virtual economies, or in-app purchase flows, and care deeply about building high-quality user experiences we’d love to work with you. What you’ll do Build and optimize user-facing features across mobile and web that power payments, subscriptions, and in-app purchase flows. Design and experiment with monetization surfaces, from virtual currency systems to premium upsells to advertising. Partner closely with design and product to create delightful, performant, and trustworthy purchase experiences. Collaborate with data science to define monetization success metrics, run experiments, and analyze outcomes. Work with backends to design scalable, reliable systems for payments, entitlements, and transactions. Maintain a high bar for UI/UX polish, performance, and privacy in sensitive user flows. Help shape the company’s approach to monetization experimentation, including frameworks for A/B testing and iteration velocity. Who you are Experience in consumer products with monetization, IAP, or subscription flows. Deep understanding of Typescript, React, React Native, Tailwind, HTML, and modern front-end best practices. Comfortable contributing to backend services, ideally with Python or Golang, especially for payments or commerce systems. Demonstrated experience shipping user-facing features that drove measurable monetization or engagement outcomes. Proven ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, balancing iteration speed with quality and reliability. Excellent communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, design, and data. Nice to Have Background in gaming, virtual currencies, or digital goods ecosystems. Prior experience with payment processors, subscription platforms, or marketplace ecosystems. Passion for user psychology, reward systems, and designing engaging monetization loops. Exposure to startup or zero-to-one product development environments. About Character.AI Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination. Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures. In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach. Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI! At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success. Apply for this Job Powered by Privacy PolicySecurityVulnerability Disclosure

Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.

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