Character.AI

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 http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

Character.AI http://Character.AI is building what comes after television, after gaming, after social media. We're creating a new medium—one where anyone can bring a character to life and share it with millions. Our platform is already one of the largest consumer AI products on Earth. Millions of people use Character every day to talk, play, learn, and create. Now we're building the tools and formats that will define what entertainment looks like for the next decade. The company has scaled rapidly to tens of millions of monthly active users, reached unicorn status within roughly two years, and was named Google Play’s AI App of the Year, reflecting both mainstream adoption and strong cultural relevance. Product Overview The Core Product team owns the foundational experiences that define Character.AI http://Character.AI’s identity and long-term differentiation: - Conversations: Long-form, emotionally engaging interactions powered by frontier language models. - Characters: Creation, discovery, and interaction with AI characters that feel alive and distinct. - Creative & Creator Tools: Systems that empower users and creators to expand the content ecosystem. The product challenge is not simply making AI work, but translating rapidly evolving model capabilities into polished, intuitive, and magical consumer experiences that keep users engaged for hours at a time. Role Overview: Product Manager, Core Product This role shapes the heart of Character.AI http://Character.AI. As a Product Manager on Core Product, you will own the experiences that users spend the most time with—conversations, characters, discovery, and creation. The role sits at the intersection of AI research, engineering, design, and entertainment, requiring exceptional product intuition and the ability to operate in high ambiguity. Success is measured less by short-term metric spikes and more by sustained session depth, emotional engagement, and product quality. Key Focus Areas - Emotional Resonance: Creating products that feel alive, personal, and meaningful. - 0→1 Innovation: Shipping open-ended, ambiguous experiences that unlock new forms of AI entertainment. - AI-to-Product Translation: Turning new model capabilities into tangible, delightful user value. - Creator Ecosystem: Expanding tools that empower creators and grow the content supply side. Key Responsibilities - Own end-to-end product development for core user experiences, including conversations, character interactions, and discovery - Execute on product vision and ship ambiguous, open-ended experiences leveraging current and future AI model capabilities - Develop deep user empathy by understanding motivations, behaviors, and emotional needs - Partner closely with AI research to identify opportunities enabled by new model capabilities - Collaborate with engineering, design, and community teams to deliver polished, intuitive products - Build and iterate on creator-facing tools that expand the platform’s content ecosystem - Partner with data science to measure engagement depth, product quality, and user satisfaction - Drive cross-functional execution, release coordination, and continuous improvement. Key Requirements - 5+ years of consumer product management experience - Proven track record launching successful products from 0→1 or major evolutions at scale - Strong intuition for products where engagement, session depth, and delight matter - Ability to balance near-term execution with long-term product vision - Strong design sensibility; experience in design or design-adjacent roles strongly preferred - Comfort operating in ambiguity and partnering closely with engineering and research teams. What Character.AI http://Character.AI Is Looking For Character.AI http://Character.AI is seeking a “Product Architect”—a PM who values craft, taste, and intuition as much as execution. This role is ideal for someone who wants to define what AI entertainment feels like, not just optimize funnels or dashboards. Ideal Candidate Profile - A creative, taste-led PM or senior designer transitioned into product - Background in entertainment, gaming, social, interactive media, or UGC platforms - Strong aesthetic judgment and obsession with product polish - Curious and conversant in AI/ML concepts, able to push research teams with the right questions - Bias toward shipping high-quality experiences over incremental metric tweaks ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

About the Role We’re hiring a Technical Program Manager, AI Infrastructure to lead high-impact programs that power Character.AI http://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 http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for a talented and creative Software Engineer to join our Safety Engineering team at Character.AI http://Character.AI! In this role, you will be at the forefront of designing, developing, and scaling robust backend systems and leveraging applied machine learning to tackle critical integrity and safety challenges. You will be architecting and implementing innovative solutions in a key role in addressing the unique safety challenges that come with human-to-AI interaction—bringing your technical expertise to the table as we define industry best practices in this emerging space. This is a high-impact role where you will provide technical leadership, drive innovation, and contribute to the core of our platform's trustworthiness. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Architect & Build: Design, develop, and maintain highly scalable, resilient, and performant backend systems that power our integrity and safety features. - Lead Complex Solutions: Lead the technical design and implementation of sophisticated backend solutions for detecting, preventing, and mitigating a wide array of integrity risks. This includes traditional issues (e.g., content classification, spam, etc.) as well as emerging threats related to Generative AI (e.g., misuse of generative models, generation of harmful or biased content, etc). - Apply Machine Learning: Conceptualize, develop, deploy, and iterate on machine learning models and algorithms to address complex integrity challenges. This includes areas like content classification (including AI-generated content), anomaly detection, risk scoring, behavior analysis, and developing safeguards for Generative AI systems (e.g., robust content filtering, bias mitigation techniques, and output monitoring). - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, data scientists, AI researchers, security teams, and operations to define requirements, design innovative solutions, and deliver impactful integrity systems, especially for Generative AI products. - Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Drive the long-term technical vision and roadmap for backend integrity systems and applied ML capabilities, with a keen eye on addressing Generative AI safety concerns with an alignment with company objectives. - Mentorship & Leadership: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers on the team and across the organization, fostering a culture of engineering excellence. - Champion Best Practices: Advocate for and implement best practices in software engineering, distributed systems design, data engineering, and the full lifecycle of ML model development, including specific considerations for the safety and ethics of Generative AI. - System Optimization: Continuously analyze and improve the performance, scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of existing integrity platforms and ML models. - Stay Current: Keep abreast of emerging threats, new technologies, and advancements in backend engineering, distributed systems, the application of machine learning to trust and safety, and the evolving landscape of Generative AI safety research and mitigation techniques. WHO YOU ARE - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong emphasis on backend systems development. - Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. - Proven track record of designing, building, and operating complex, large-scale, and highly available distributed systems. - Expertise in one or more backend programming languages such as Python, Go, Java, or C++. - Hands-on experience in applying machine learning techniques to solve real-world problems, specifically with demonstrable experience in addressing integrity, trust, or safety challenges. - Solid understanding of the machine learning lifecycle, including data gathering and cleaning, feature engineering, model selection, training, validation, A/B testing, deployment, and operational monitoring. - Exceptional problem-solving abilities, with a knack for tackling ambiguous and technically challenging problems. - Proven ability to work in a fast-paced development environment and deliver timely results. - Strong communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences. You will be a great fit if: - You care deeply about Trust & Safety and see it as a value-add to the business - Prior experience in a dedicated Trust & Safety, Integrity, or Risk engineering team. - Contributions to open-source projects or publications in relevant fields. - Experience leading large, cross-cutting technical projects. ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

About the Role As a Software / ML Engineer you will work cross functionally with product, data science and data platform to identify, design and implement the applied ML models and infra, ranging from the model optimization, data pipeline to model training and serving infrastructure, on one of the fastest growing native AI consumer applications on the market today. You will work on implementation of our ML backend systems to power the discovery surfaces including recommendation, ranking and search, supporting new AI generated content formats on our product while working with the team to support optimizing our existing systems. Requirements: - B.A.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience. - 5+ years of industry experience - Experience building/consuming RESTful and gRPC based web-services - Experience building and managing infrastructure in a cloud environment (GCP, AWS or Azure) - Familiar with one of the popular ML Frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow - Experience writing highly performant service in a modern typed language - Experience configuring and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automated testing Desired Experience: - Experience with shipping intelligent features, end-to-end, and from idea to production - Experience with understanding, designing or implementing a full pipeline from data ingestion to model training. - Experience with production AI/ML systems and services including optimizing GPU/TPU deployments - Experience working with vector databases or other feature storage You will be a good fit if you are proactive and have a “get things done” mindset. Given our current pace of growth and load on our systems, most people have had a significant impact during their first week at the company. ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

ABOUT THE ROLE AND TEAM Joining us as a Research Engineer on the Post-Training team, you'll be diving into the exciting world of fine-tuning AI models, optimizing their performance, and ensuring they meet the highest standards of quality and efficiency. Your work will directly contribute to our groundbreaking advancements in AI, helping shape an era where technology is not just a tool, but a companion in our daily lives. At Character.AI http://Character.AI, your talent, creativity, and expertise will not just be valued—they will be the catalyst for change in an AI-driven future. The Post-Training team is responsible for developing our powerful pretrained language models into intelligent, engaging, and aligned products. As a Post-Training Researcher, you will work across teams and our technical stack to improve our model performance and training methods, including data, compute and algorithms. You will get to shape the conversational experience of millions of users per day. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Develop alignment algorithms and loss functions to improve data sample efficiency. - Write data pipelines to process diverse web data into a format models can ingest. - Identify quality signals to understand our model’s performance in the real world. - Design sampling algorithms to improve serving efficiency of large generative models. WHO YOU ARE - "All Industry Levels": have at least PhD (or equivalent) - Write clear and clean production-facing and training code - Experience working with GPUs (training, serving, debugging) - Experience with data pipelines and data infrastructure - Strong understanding of modern machine learning techniques (reinforcement learning, transformers, etc) - Track-record of exceptional research or creative applied ML projects NICE TO HAVE - Experience with product experimentation and A/B testing - Experience training large models in a distributed setting - Familiarity with ML deployment and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud) - Publications in relevant academic journals or conferences in the field of machine learning ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

ABOUT THE ROLE AND TEAM Joining us as a Research Engineer on the Multimodal team, you'll be at the forefront of building and advancing video and image generation models that bring AI characters to life in entirely new ways. Your work will directly shape how millions of users experience rich, expressive, and visually compelling AI interactions every day. The Multimodal team is responsible for training, fine-tuning, and deploying cutting-edge image, audio and video generation models that power Character.AI http://Character.AI's visual experiences. We work across the full model lifecycle — from data pipelines and training to deployment and product integration. As a Multimodal Research Engineer, you will own and advance our video model training efforts, including joint audio-visual generation and image-to-video. You will collaborate across research, product, and infrastructure to push the boundaries of what AI-generated visuals can look and feel like at scale. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead fine-tuning and continued training of video generation models, including image-to-video and joint audio-visual generation. - Design and experiment with novel model architectures for multimodal generation, including multimodal conditioning (voice, structured text, reference images). - Leverage techniques such as LoRA, RLHF, and full-parameter fine-tuning to improve model quality across diverse visual scenarios. - Design and build large-scale data pipelines and automated annotation workflows to support continuous model improvement. - Explore model compression, inference acceleration, and serving optimizations to enable efficient real-time video processing at scale. WHO YOU ARE - Strong passion for pushing the boundaries of visual AI, with a self-driven, hands-on approach to solving complex technical problems - Proficient in PyTorch with end-to-end experience across data processing, model training, and deployment - Solid understanding of video and image generation architectures, including diffusion models, DiT, ControlNet, and SOTA video generation models - Experience with multimodal model training, including working with audio, vision, and language modalities together - Experience with distributed training tools (FSDP, DeepSpeed, etc.) - Experience with large-scale data processing, dataset construction, and automated data cleaning NICE TO HAVE - Experience with joint audio-visual or speech-conditioned generation models - Experience with AIGC, video effects, character animation, or asset generation products - Familiarity with ML deployment and orchestration (Kubernetes, Slurm, Docker, cloud platforms) - Publications in relevant venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, or similar) ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

ABOUT THE ROLE AND TEAM Joining us as a Research Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of tackling one of the most critical challenges in AI today: safety and alignment. Your work will be pivotal in understanding and mitigating the risks of advanced AI, conducting foundational research to make our models safer, and solving the core technical problems of AI alignment—ensuring our models behave in accordance with human values and intentions. The Safety team is dedicated to pioneering and implementing techniques that make our models more robust, honest, and harmless. As a Research Engineer, you will bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical application, writing high-quality code to test hypotheses and integrating successful safety solutions directly into our products. Your research will not only protect millions of users but also contribute to the broader scientific community's understanding of how to build safe, beneficial AI. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Develop and implement novel evaluation methodologies and metrics to assess the safety and alignment of large language models. - Research and develop cutting-edge techniques for model alignment, value learning, and interpretability. - Conduct adversarial testing to proactively uncover potential vulnerabilities and failure modes in our models. - Analyze and mitigate biases, toxicity, and other harmful behaviors in large language models through techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and fine-tuning. - Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate safety research into practical, scalable solutions and best practices. - Stay abreast of the latest advancements in AI safety research and contribute to the academic community through publications and presentations. WHO YOU ARE - Hold a PhD (or equivalent experience) in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related discipline. - Write clear and clean production-facing and training code - Experience working with GPUs (training, serving, debugging) - Experience with data pipelines and data infrastructure - Strong understanding of modern machine learning techniques, particularly transformers and reinforcement learning, with a focus on their safety implications. - Are passionate about the responsible development of AI and dedicated to solving complex safety challenges. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with product experimentation and A/B testing - Experience training large models in a distributed setting - Familiarity with ML deployment and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud) - Experience with explainable AI (XAI) and interpretability techniques. - Have research in AI safety, alignment, ethics, or a related area. - Knowledge of the broader societal and ethical implications of AI, including policy and governance. - Publications in relevant academic journals or conferences in the field of machine learning ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for seasoned ML Infrastructure engineers with experience designing, building and maintaining training and serving infrastructure for ML research. Responsibilities: - Provide infrastructure support to our ML research and product - Build tooling to diagnose cluster issues and hardware failures - Monitor deployments, manage experiments, and generally support our research - Maximize GPU allocation and utilization for both serving and training Requirements: - 4+ years of experience supporting the infrastructure within an ML environment - Experience in developing tools used to diagnose ML infrastructure problems and failures - Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Compute Engine, Kubernetes, Cloud Storage) - Experience working with GPUs Nice to have - Experience with large GPU clusters and high-performance computing/networking - Experience with supporting large language model training - Experience with ML frameworks like Pytorch/TensorFlow/JAX - Experience with GPU kernel development ABOUT CHARACTER.AI Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.

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 http://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 http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://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.