Software Engineer, Applied ML (Discovery, Recommendation & Search)

Location: Hybrid in Redwood City, California, United States

Salary: $200,000–$300,000 per year

Company

Character.AI develops an interactive entertainment platform that uses consumer AI to help people connect, learn, tell stories, and engage with AI characters.

What you will do

• Identify, design, and implement applied machine learning models and infrastructure.
• Build and optimize ML backend systems for recommendation, ranking, and search surfaces.
• Support AI-generated content formats and improve existing product systems.
• Develop data pipelines, model training workflows, and model serving infrastructure.
• Collaborate with product, data science, and data platform teams to deliver intelligent features from concept to production.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of industry experience.
• Experience building or consuming RESTful and gRPC-based web services.
• Experience building and managing cloud infrastructure with GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Familiarity with a popular ML framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience writing highly performant services in a modern typed language and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing.

Nice to have

• Experience shipping intelligent features end to end, from idea to production.
• Experience designing or implementing pipelines from data ingestion through model training.
• Experience with production AI/ML systems, including GPU/TPU deployment optimization.
• Experience with vector databases or other feature storage systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Majority of health insurance premiums covered for employees and families.
• Generous 401(k) contribution.
• Up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Four weeks of paid time off.
• Daily in-office catering, monthly DoorDash stipend, and monthly wellness stipend.
• Equal opportunity workplace committed to diversity and inclusion.