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Technical Program Manager, Product Experience
Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States
Pay
$200k–300k
Setting
On-site
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
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Listed by Character.AI for a position based in the United States. Employers on this board attest they are hiring domestically.
Principal Research Engineer, Post-Training
Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States
Pay
$275k–400k
Setting
On-site
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.
Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment
Character.AI · Redwood City, California, United States
Pay
$220k–260k
Setting
On-site
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.
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