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Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment

Character.AI, Redwood City, CA

Posted pay

$220K–$260K

a year

Location: Redwood City, CA
Work type: Not given
Level: Not given
Experience: 5+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
SQL
Kubernetes
Docker
Posted: Jun 1, 2026
Last check: 6 h ago
Job type: Product management

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CA

Character.AI

About Character.AI: funding, hiring and pay

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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. Together, these groups are responsible for transforming powerful pretrained language models into intelligent, engaging, safely aligned, and highly scalable products—working across data, compute, algorithms, infrastructure, and user insights to improve model performance and ensure reliable delivery.

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. You'll partner closely with research engineers, safety experts, data scientists, infrastructure engineers, and UX researchers to turn ambitious model development goals into well-scoped, well-tracked, cross-functional programs.

You will ensure that the data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, alignment workflows, and serving infrastructure underpinning our models are moving fast and moving well. You'll operate effectively in high-ambiguity environments, anticipate risks before they become blockers, and bring the kind of technical fluency needed to earn trust with researchers while communicating clearly to leadership.

What you will do

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. Establish scopes, goals, timelines, risks, and success metrics.
Cross-functional coordination: Serve as the connective tissue between Post-Training, Safety Engineering, Trust & Safety, ML Infra, UXR, and Product. Translate model development, safety, and user experience priorities into executable roadmaps, keeping tightly coupled workstreams aligned from post-training through to production deployment.
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.
Operational excellence: Drive visibility into data pipeline health, annotation quality, training run progress, and deployment readiness. Identify bottlenecks across teams and lead efforts to improve tooling, process, and developer velocity.
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.

What you need

5+ years of experience in technical program management, research operations, or product execution in a fast-moving AI, ML, or research environment.
Deep familiarity with post-training and alignment concepts (supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, AI safety frameworks, LLM evaluation) as well as model deployment/serving, sufficient to engage substantively with both research and infrastructure engineers.
Proven ability to lead complex, multi-team programs in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments; track record of shipping with quality and speed.
Strong analytical mindset; comfortable working with data and user insights to measure program health, identify trends, and drive decisions.
Proficiency in SQL and Python.
Exceptional communication skills – able to translate deep technical work into clear narratives for leadership, and to hold detailed technical conversations with engineers across different disciplines.
Obsessive about data integrity, operational rigor, and process quality without letting process slow teams down.
BS in a quantitative, scientific, or technical field; MS or PhD a plus.

Nice to have

Hands-on experience with data pipelines, annotation platforms, ML evaluation tooling, or human-in-the-loop workflows.
Experience managing annotation vendors or external data partners.
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.

In just two years, we achieved unicorn status and were honored as Google Play's AI App of the Year—a testament to our innovative technology and visionary approach.

Join us and be a part of establishing this new entertainment paradigm while shaping the future of Consumer AI!

Legal notes

At Character, we value diversity and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability. Your unique perspectives are vital to our success.

Read the job posting on the Character.AI site

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Source: the Character.AI Ashby job board. We last checked this job 6 h ago. We first saw it 4 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now. We found this job board in a public list. We did not yet compare it with the careers page of the company.

Company facts

Money raised: $150MSum of funding rounds on record
Newest round: Series AMar 23, 2023

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

Character.AI

Open tech jobs: 13
With posted pay: 100%
Median posted base: $200K–$300K

About Character.AI: funding, hiring and pay

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for product management jobs in the Bay Area with no level in the job title.

Median: $210K a year
Other jobs in the group: 439

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.