Technical Program Manager, Character.ai
AI Infrastructure
$220-260k
+ Equity
Office located in Redwood City, CA
AI natural language chatbot
Be an early applicant
AI natural language chatbot
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$220-260k
+ Equity
Office located in Redwood City, CA
201-500 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- We’re hiring a Program Manager, AI Infrastructure to lead high-impact programs that power 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
- 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
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 needs 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 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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