Character.AI

Character.AI

Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment

Redwood City, CA

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 50 days ago
AlgorithmsSQLDockerKubernetesMachine LearningData EngineeringLLMsResearchLeadershipCommunication

About the role

  • Model Alignment and Deployment is a critical, cross-functional effort spanning our Post-Training, Safety Engineering, Trust & Safety, ML Infra/Model Serving, and User Experience Research (UXR) teams.
  • As a Technical Program Manager, you will be the operational and programmatic backbone connecting these teams: driving clarity, structure, and execution across some of the most technically complex and high-stakes work at Character.AI http://Character.AI.
  • This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of research, safety, user experience, and production.

Responsibilities

  • Program ownership: Lead planning and execution of cross-functional programs spanning data collection, annotation pipelines, alignment workflows (RLHF, DPO, Constitutional AI), safety guardrails (adversarial testing, red-teaming), and model serving.
  • Evaluation & quality: Develop and maintain custom evaluation frameworks to track model performance and user satisfaction.
  • Drive comprehensive quality evaluation initiatives alongside rigorous safety and toxicity baselines.
  • Partner with UXR, researchers, and engineers to identify quality signals, incorporate human feedback, and surface actionable insights on model behavior in production.
  • Strategic partnership: Partner with research, safety, product, and UXR leadership on prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs-balancing aggressive capability scaling with strict safety requirements, user needs, and infrastructure constraints.
  • Process development: Build and refine the operational patterns, ontologies, and frameworks used to scale new capability development-from prompt engineering and data generation to model behavior specification and safety guidelines.
  • Vendor & partner management: Own external partner relationships supporting these workstreams, including general and safety-focused annotation vendors, evaluation tooling providers, and data partners.
  • Proven ability to lead complex, multi-team programs in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments
  • Proven ability to lead complex, multi-team programs in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments; track record of shipping with quality and speed.
  • Partner with research, safety, product, and UXR leadership on prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs-balancing aggressive capability scaling with strict safety requirements, user needs, and infrastructure constraints.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience in technical program management, research operations, or product execution in a fast-moving AI, ML, or research environment.
  • Proficiency in SQL and Python.

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience with data pipelines, annotation platforms, ML evaluation tooling, or human-in-the-loop workflows.
  • Familiarity with distributed training, experiment tracking, or ML infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud) and model serving systems.
  • Prior experience embedded in an AI research team, foundation model lab, or Trust & Safety engineering team.
  • Direct experience managing AI safety, trust, quality eval, or red-teaming programs.
  • ABOUT CHARACTER.AI
  • Character.AI http://Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment.
  • Over 20 million people visit Character.AI http://Character.AI every month, using our technology to supercharge their creativity and imagination.
  • Our platform lets users engage with tens of millions of characters, enjoy unlimited conversations, and embark on infinite adventures.

Benefits

  • Drive visibility into data pipeline health, annotation quality, training run progress, and deployment readiness.
  • Strong analytical mindset; comfortable working with data and user insights to measure program health, identify trends, and drive decisions.
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This listing is sourced directly from Character.AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.