Staff Software Engineer - Data

Character’s mission is to empower everyone with AGI. Our vision is to enable people with our technology so that they can use Character.AI any moment of any day.

Character.AI is one of the world’s leading personal AI platforms. Founded in 2021 by AI pioneers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI is a full-stack AI company with a globally scaled direct-to-consumer platform. As of 2023 that platform was #2 in the space in user engagement. Character.AI is uniquely centered around people, letting users personalize their experience by interacting with AI “Characters.” The company achieved unicorn status in 2023 and was named Google Play’s AI App of the Year.

Noam co-invented the key tech powering LLMs and was recently named to TIME100’s Most Influential People in AI list. TIME called him “one of the most important and impactful people of the space’s past, present, and future.” Daniel created and led LaMDA, the breakthrough conversational tech project currently powering Bard.

To learn more, please visit beta.character.ai.

Responsibilities:

As a Staff Software Engineer - Data at Character, you'll have the opportunity to work on a diverse and exciting set of projects spanning both software engineering and data engineering domains. Your initial focus will be on three key areas:

1. Activate our "data flywheel": Develop data pipelines and collaborate with ML researchers to ensure continuous improvement of our AI models and alignment with human feedback.

2. Evolve our A/B testing framework: Conduct a thorough analysis of our current A/B testing framework and prepare it for the next generation of data-driven product growth.

3. Enable product team insights: Design, implement, and maintain a robust data warehousing solution for consistent and reliable reporting and ease of data exploration as we continue to better understand our users.

In addition, you may work on optimizing database and application performance, cleaning pre-training datasets, and contributing to service oriented architecture alongside the Staff Software Engineer - Application.

Requirements:

• B.A.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

• 4+ years minimum experience in data engineering within a consumer-facing technology company

• Experience building data warehousing and data pipelines with Big Query, dbt, Ray, Beam and Spark.

• Experience designing, implementing and supporting end-to-end A/B tests

• Experiencing managing Elasticsearch, Spanner, Postgres

• In-depth experience building and managing infrastructure in a cloud environment (esp. GCP)

• Strong Python and SQL experience

Desired Experience:

• Experience tuning databases and optimizing query performance

• Experience setting up containerization with Docker and Kubernetes

• Familiarity with PyTorch or JAX

• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and as part of a team

• Strong communication and collaboration skills

• Experience writing and maintaining Golang and Terraform code

You will be a good fit if you are proactive and have a “get things done” mindset. Given our current pace of growth and load on our systems, most people have had a significant impact during their first week at the company.

Character is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. We value diversity and encourage applicants from a range of backgrounds to apply.