Software Engineer, Character.ai
Monetization
$150-300k
Office located in Redwood City, CA
AI natural language chatbot
Open for applications
AI natural language chatbot
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$150-300k
Office located in Redwood City, CA
101-200 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
Desirable
- 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
What the job involves
- Our monetization team is reimagining how users interact with virtual currency, subscriptions, and premium features in ways that feel intuitive, rewarding, and fun
- 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
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
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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