Technical Product Manager, Character.ai
Product Experience
$200-300k
3+ days a week in office (Redwood City, CA)
AI natural language chatbot
Be an early applicant
AI natural language chatbot
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-300k
3+ days a week in office (Redwood City, CA)
201-500 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
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 in 2023, 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 needs to compete against OpenAI and other major firms in the market. It's exploring research-based partnerships with large companies such as Musk's xAI and Meta, but it must navigate a series of regulatory hurdles triggered by high-profile user lawsuits.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (1 round)
Mar 2023
$150m
SERIES A
Total funding: $150m
Company benefits
- 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
Company HQ
Menlo Park, CA
Leadership
Karandeep Anand
(CEO)Previously Board Advisor at Character and Brex. Also worked as Vice President and Head of Business Products at Facebook and was a Partner Director at Microsoft.
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