Technical Program Manager (AI)

Location: Redwood City, CA

Salary: $220K – $260K

Company

Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment using cutting-edge Consumer AI.

What you will do

• Lead planning and execution of programs covering data collection, RLHF, DPO, Constitutional AI, and safety red-teaming.
• Coordinate workstreams across Post-Training, Safety Engineering, ML Infra, and UXR teams to align roadmaps from development to production.
• Develop and maintain custom evaluation frameworks to track model performance, user satisfaction, and safety baselines.
• Optimize operational velocity by identifying bottlenecks in data pipelines, annotation quality, and deployment readiness.
• Partner with leadership to balance aggressive capability scaling with infrastructure constraints and safety requirements.
• Manage external relationships with annotation vendors and evaluation tooling providers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in TPM, research operations, or product execution within AI/ML environments.
• Deep understanding of post-training concepts (SFT, RLHF, LLM evaluation) and model serving.
• Proficiency in SQL and Python.
• BS in a quantitative, scientific, or technical field.
• Proven track record of shipping complex, multi-team programs in ambiguous environments.
• Exceptional communication skills for translating technical work into leadership narratives.

Nice to have

• Experience with data pipelines, annotation platforms, or human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud) and distributed training.
• Prior experience in a foundation model lab or Trust & Safety engineering team.
• Direct experience managing AI red-teaming or quality evaluation programs.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive health coverage for employees and their families.
• Generous 401(K) contributions.
• Up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave.
• 4 weeks of PTO.
• Daily in-office catering and a monthly Doordash stipend.
• Monthly wellness stipend.