Software Engineer, Character.ai
Trust & Safety
$150-300k
+ Offers Equity
3-5 days a week in office (Menlo Park, CA)
AI natural language chatbot
Open for applications
AI natural language chatbot
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$150-300k
+ Offers Equity
3-5 days a week in office (Menlo Park, CA)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years experience building and scaling backend systems to support a fast-growing consumer application
- 3+ years experience working on safety and data governance-related Engineering projects
- Experience writing highly performant services and strong knowledge of Python and/or Golang
- Designing, implementing, and maintaining individual microservices that collectively form complex, scalable backend systems
- Extensive experience with various database technologies, both relational (like PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (such as MongoDB, Cassandra, or DynamoDB). Proficiency in database design, sharding, replication, and tuning for high-traffic environments is highly desirable
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a knack for identifying and addressing bottlenecks, ensuring that backend systems perform optimally under varying loads
- Proven ability to work collaboratively with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to conceive, design, and implement new features that enhance user experience
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to cross-functional teams and stakeholders
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- You are proactive and have a “get things done” mindset
- You enjoy working cross-functionally across different teams (e.g. Legal and Product) and balancing privacy, safety, and product needs
- You’re excited to create new technological systems from the ground up
- You care deeply about Trust & Safety and see it as a value-add to the business
- You’re willing to tackle new challenges and new responsibilities as the company grows
- You have a passion for creating innovative AI experiences, and you’re enthusiastic to lay the groundwork for our product teams to harness the power of AI
What the job involves
- We are seeking a talented and creative Software Engineer to join our Safety Engineering team!
- As a Software Engineering working on Safety Engineering at Character.AI, you’ll partner closely with our Trust & Safety, Legal, and Product teams to design and implement systems that prevent abuse and promote user safety across our platform
- You'll have a seat at the table to devise industry-leading ways to tackle the novel Trust & Safety issues that arise from human-to-AI interaction
- Design and build tooling and content moderation infrastructure custom-designed for an AI platform. Iterate on that tooling and architecture as we build out new product lines and data streams
- Partner with the Trust & Safety team to determine what to build and what to buy
- Partner with Trust & Safety and other engineers to determine where AI should be used to augment the moderation process
- Build tooling and architecture that allows the Trust & Safety process to feed into better AI training techniques, and vice versa. Ensure we are using our data across both teams to maximize safety and positive experiences on our platform
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
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
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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