Research Engineer, Post-Training (All Industry Levels)
At a glance
Mid-level AI Research role at Character.AI. Redwood City or New York City · full-time · $225,000–$400,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build alignment methods and loss functions that make training data go further
- Create pipelines that turn varied web sources into model-ready data
- Find signals that show how models perform in real-world use
- Develop sampling methods to use large generative models more efficiently in serving
What you bring
- A PhD or equivalent qualification is required
- You can write clear, maintainable code for both production systems and model training
- You have worked with GPUs for training, serving or debugging, and with data pipelines or infrastructure
- You understand modern machine learning, including reinforcement learning and transformers, and have a strong research or applied ML project record
Who this fits
This role suits a research engineer who combines machine learning work with production code, GPU experience and data infrastructure skills. It is listed as hybrid in the United States.
From the employer
About the role and team
Joining us as a Research Engineer on the Post-Training team, you'll be diving into the exciting world of fine-tuning AI models, optimizing their performance, and ensuring they meet the highest standards of quality and efficiency. Your work will directly contribute to our groundbreaking advancements in AI, helping shape an era where technology is not just a tool, but a companion in our daily lives. At Character.AI, your talent, creativity, and expertise will not just be valued—they will be the catalyst for change in an AI-driven future.
The Post-Training team is responsible for developing our powerful pretrained language models into intelligent, engaging, and aligned products.
As a Post-Training Researcher, you will work across teams and our technical stack to improve our model performance and training methods, including data, compute and algorithms. You will get to shape the conversational experience of millions of users per day.
What you'll do
Develop alignment algorithms and loss functions to improve data sample efficiency.
Write data pipelines to process diverse web data into a format models can ingest.
Identify quality signals to understand our model’s performance in the real world.
Design sampling algorithms to improve serving efficiency of large generative models.
Who you are
"All Industry Levels": have at least PhD (or equivalent)
Write clear and clean production-facing and training code
Experience working with GPUs (training, serving, debugging)
Experience with data pipelines and data infrastructure
Strong understanding of modern machine learning techniques (reinforcement learning, transformers, etc)
Track-record of exceptional research or creative applied ML projects
Nice to Have
Experience with product experimentation and A/B testing
Experience training large models in a distributed setting
Familiarity with ML deployment and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud)
Publications in relevant academic journals or conferences in the field of machine learning
About Character.AI
Character.AI empowers people to connect, learn and tell stories through interactive entertainment. Over 20 million people visit 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!
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.