Hiring: Technical Program Manager, Model Alignment and Deployment Company: Character.ai Location: Redwood City, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-02 17:59:13 Employment Type: Full-Time Target Skills & Keywords: Technical Program Management, Model Alignment, Model Deployment, RLHF, DPO, Constitutional AI, Safety Guardrails, Adversarial Testing, Red-Teaming, Model Serving, ML Infrastructure, Evaluation Frameworks, Data Pipelines, Annotation Pipelines, Cross-Functional Coordination, Post-Training, Trust & Safety, User Experience Research, Vendor Management Experience: - 5+ years of experience in technical program management or a related field - Proven track record leading cross-functional programs spanning data, compute, algorithms, infrastructure, and user insights - Experience operating in high-ambiguity environments and anticipating risks before they become blockers - Demonstrated ability to earn trust with researchers while communicating clearly to leadership Required Skills: - 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 - Cross-functional coordination: Serve as connective tissue between Post-Training, Safety Engineering, Trust & Safety, ML Infra, UXR, and Product teams - Evaluation & quality: Develop and maintain custom evaluation frameworks to track model performance and user satisfaction - Operational excellence: Drive visibility into data pipeline health, annotation quality, training run progress, and deployment readiness - Strategic partnership: Partner with research, safety, product, and UXR leadership on prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs - Process development: Build and refine operational patterns, ontologies, and frameworks for scaling new capability development - Vendor & partner management: Own external partner relationships including annotation vendors, evaluation tooling providers, and data partners Qualifications: - 5+ years of experience in technical program management or related discipline - Strong technical fluency to earn trust with researchers and communicate effectively with leadership - Experience with model alignment, safety engineering, and deployment workflows - Ability to balance aggressive capability scaling with strict safety requirements, user needs, and infrastructure constraints - Experience working at the intersection of research, safety, user experience, and production Compensation: Not specified in the provided job text. Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don’t miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!