Research Engineer, Character.ai
Multimodal, All Industry Levels
$225-400k
+ Equity
AI natural language chatbot
Open for applications
AI natural language chatbot
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$225-400k
+ Equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for scrappy and self-motivated people who have full-stack machine learning skills: collecting data, training state-of-the-art models, building evaluations, writing efficient inference algorithms, and iterating on user feedback
- Need at least 2+ years of industry experience working deep in the weeds on hard ML problems
- Negative example: just stringing together a bunch of pre-existing components together. Need signal that this person can think critically about different parts of the pipline
- Have a deep understanding of the “whole stack” when it comes to designing, training, evaluating and deploying machine learning models, especially large language models
- Collected a new giant dataset
- Published research papers
- Played a critical role in shipping a new ML product that required custom components
- Writing distributed ML infrastructure
- Have debugged and fixed hard-to-find bugs in ML models
- Have a track record of successfully owning projects from start to finish
- Have experience with generative models for various modalities
- Experience working with proven tools: ML frameworks (Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, …), data processing frameworks (Spark, Beam, …)
What the job involves
- In the day-to-day, you will be responsible for developing new AI capabilities end-to-end
- This means you will need to wear a lot of hats across the full ML stack. You should be comfortable thinking about all parts of the problem, and ready to work on any and all components of it
- Determining the type of training data we need, finding where we can collect it, and writing distributed data gathering pipelines to ingest data
- Developing new model architectures that push the state-of-the-art in terms of quality, scale, and inference speed
- Creating new evaluations that capture different aspects of generative outputs
- Writing fast inference algorithms to serve these models at scale
- Working with product teams to integrate feedback mechanisms into the product, which we use to improve the model
Our take
Search engines have long been a boon to productivity, but a long period of heavy advertising, content and SEO spam and malicious actors have limited the effectiveness of traditional keyword searching. Recently, conversational AI assistants have arrived, allowing non-specialists to navigate an increasingly difficult sea of data and return with relevant information, presented in a usable and sometimes very entertaining way.
Character.ai is one of the more recent entries in this increasingly crowded field that has only grown more heated since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022. However, compared to Microsoft and OpenAI's offerings, Character.ai stands out with a more playful personality - its bots can mimic the voices of celebrities, historical persons and popular characters. This has led to users spending vastly more time interacting with Character.ai's bots compared to the competition: nearly three times longer on average than with ChatGPT, for instance.
Following a period of rapid user growth, Character.ai closed a major funding round at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. While it is currently enjoying meteoric success, in the longer term, Character.ai's challenge is to develop a funding model that will give it the staying power it will need to compete against OpenAI and other major firms in the market. A solution it is currently exploring is research-based partnerships with large companies such as Musk's xAI and Meta.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (1 round)
Mar 2023
$150m
SERIES A
Total funding: $150m
Company HQ
Menlo Park, CA
Articles
Leadership
Noam Shazeer
(CEO)Previously worked at Google for almost 20 years as a Software Engineer then Principal Software Engineer.
Daniel De Freitas
(President)Before co-founding Character.ai was a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Google. Prior to that, they were a Software Engineer at Microsoft.
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