Software Engineer, Character.ai
Growth
$150-300k
+ Equity
AI natural language chatbot
Be an early applicant
AI natural language chatbot
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$150-300k
+ Equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To empower everyone with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Role
Who you are
- Experience as a Front-End or Full-Stack Software Engineer, ideally in consumer product environments
- Deep understanding of Typescript, CSS, React, React Native, HTML, and modern front end design patterns and best practices
- Comfortable working across the stack and contributing to backend services as needed—especially in Python or Golang
- Demonstrated experience shipping user-facing features that drove measurable growth or engagement
- Analytical mindset with experience working alongside data teams using metrics and experimentation to inform decisions
- Proven ability to work in a fast-paced development environment and deliver timely results
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills across disciplines
Desirable
- Background in mobile-first or AI-powered consumer products
- Prior exposure to zero-to-one product development or startup environments
- Interest in user psychology, onboarding, and viral loops
What the job involves
- We are scaling personalized AI to billions of users by reimagining how people discover, engage with, and return to intelligent characters
- This requires blending product craftsmanship with growth experimentation and an instinct for user behavior
- We’re looking for a skilled engineer who is excited to build elegant, high-impact user experiences that drive growth
- If you thrive at the intersection of design, data, and iteration—and care deeply about quality and performance—we’d love to work with you
- Build fast, intuitive, and visually polished user-facing features that drive user acquisition, activation, and retention
- Design and run growth experiments that span product surfaces—from onboarding to virality to re-engagement loops
- Partner closely with design and product to translate high-level ideas into delightful and performant interfaces
- Collaborate with data science to define success metrics, analyze experiment outcomes, and identify opportunities
- Maintain a high bar for code quality, UI/UX polish, and performance across mobile and web platforms
- Help shape and evolve the team’s experimentation platform and tooling to improve 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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