Full-Time

Staff Data Engineer

Posted on 10/31/2025

Character.AI

Character.AI

201-500 employees

Platform to create AI virtual characters

Compensation Overview

$150k - $250k/yr

San Carlos, CA, USA + 1 more

More locations: New York, NY, USA

In Person

NYC preferred; SF Bay Area acceptable; on-site work required.

Category
Data & Analytics (1)
Requirements
  • 5+ years experience in data engineering, preferred within a consumer-facing technology company (chat, social media, or UGC)
  • Experience building data warehousing and pipelines with BigQuery, Spark, DBT and Airflow
  • Experience with processing and transforming unstructured data sources.
  • Experience modeling and scaling event telemetry systems for analytical use-cases
  • Experience implementing and supporting product experimentation data platforms
  • Proven track record of cross-functional execution and collaboration
  • Strong Python and SQL experience
  • Locations: NYC Preferred, SF Bay Area OK
Responsibilities
  • Enable product team insights: Design, implement, and maintain a robust data warehousing design for consistent and reliable reporting and ease of data exploration as we continue to better understand our users
  • Own the core company data pipeline, responsible for scaling up data processing flow to meet the rapid data growth at Character
  • Evolve data model and data schema based on business and engineering needs, help character adopt best practices
  • Implement and adopt systems tracking data quality and consistency, improve pipeline performance and reliability

Character AI builds an AI platform that lets users create and manage virtual characters with distinct personalities for use in games and business applications. The platform enables NPCs and virtual customer service representatives to interact with people in realistic, engaging ways. It works by providing tools to design character personalities, manage their behavior, and deploy them across digital environments, typically via a subscription or licensing model that gives ongoing access and updates. What sets Character AI apart is its focus on both entertainment (gaming) and practical service use, offering a scalable, multi-domain solution with a steady revenue stream rather than a single-market product. The company's goal is to broaden digital interactions by making character-driven experiences more natural and personalized, driving engagement and value for developers and businesses in the growing AI market.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Acquired

Total Funding

$2.9B

Headquarters

Menlo Park, California

Founded

2021

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • 6 million daily active users in July 2024 enable premium tier monetization expansion.
  • Non-exclusive Google licensing deal in 2024 provides resources without losing independence.
  • Freemium model offers untapped enterprise licensing in gaming and customer service.

What critics are saying

  • DOJ antitrust probe into 2024 Google deal forces divestiture within 12-24 months.
  • Founders' 2024 departure to Google causes innovation slowdown and brain drain.
  • Google commercializes Character.AI tech, capturing market share in 6-18 months.

What makes Character.AI unique

  • Character.AI specializes in customizable AI personas for entertainment and instruction, unlike general chatbots.
  • Users create and interact with virtual characters using in-house neural language models.
  • Features group chats and voice interactions for collaborative AI experiences.

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Benefits

Flexible Work Hours

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-1%

1 year growth

-3%

2 year growth

11%
Yahoo Finance
Jan 13th, 2026
DigitalOcean's AMD-powered cloud platform doubles inference performance for Character.ai, cuts costs 50%

DigitalOcean has announced that its Inference Cloud Platform, powered by AMD Instinct GPUs, is delivering double the production inference throughput for Character.ai, which handles over one billion queries daily. The platform also reduced Character.ai's cost per token by 50% whilst maintaining strict latency requirements. The performance gains resulted from close collaboration between DigitalOcean, Character.ai and AMD to optimise AMD Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs specifically for inference workloads. DigitalOcean's platform integrates hardware-aware scheduling and optimised inference runtimes, working with AMD's ROCm software stack and AITER framework. Character.ai's David Brinker said DigitalOcean delivered reliable performance that "unlocked higher sustained throughput and improved economics". The collaboration demonstrates DigitalOcean's strategy of focusing on production outcomes rather than simply GPU availability.

VentureBeat
Jun 12th, 2025
Cloud Collapse: Replit And Llamaindex Knocked Offline By Google Cloud Identity Outage

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn moreDays after OpenAI and Google Cloud announced a partnership to support the growing use of generative AI platforms, much of the AI-powered web and tools went down due to an outage of the leading cloud providers.Google Cloud Service Platform (GCP) and some Cloudflare services began experiencing issues around 10:00 a.m. PT today, affecting several AI development tools and data storage services, including ChatGPT and Claude, as well as a variety of other AI platforms.We are aware of a service disruption to some Google Cloud services and we are working hard to get you back up and running ASAP.Please view our status dashboard for the latest updates: https://t.co/sT6UxoRK4R — Google Cloud (@googlecloud) June 12, 2025A GCP spokesperson confirmed the outage to VentureBeat, urging users to check its public status dashboard.GCP said affected services include API Gateway, Agent Assist, Cloud Data Fusion, Contact Center AI Platform, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Identity Platform, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech and Vertex AI Search, among other tools. Google’s mobile development platform, Firebase, also went down.VentureBeat staffers had trouble accessing Google Meet, but other Google services on Workspace remained online.A Cloudflare spokesperson told VentureBeat only “a limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly

Yahoo Finance
May 23rd, 2025
Us Doj Probing Google Over Character.Ai Deal

The US Justice Department (DOJ) is examining whether Alphabet’s Google violated antitrust regulations through a deal involving the AI technology of Character.AI, a well-known chatbot developer, Bloomberg reported. Regulators are assessing whether the tech giant crafted the agreement to avoid formal merger oversight, sources familiar with the investigation told the publication. In the arrangement made in 2024, Character.AI’s founders returned to Google, and the company obtained a non-exclusive license to utilise the startup’s technology. The raised concerns among regulators about large tech companies suppressing emerging competitors. Google is “always happy to answer any questions from regulators,” Peter Schottenfels, a company spokesperson in an emailed statement to the publication said. “We’re excited that talent from Character.AI has joined the company, but we have no ownership stake and they remain a separate company.” The Justice Department can investigate whether the deal itself undermines competition, even if it did not require formal review, the report said

PYMNTS
May 22nd, 2025
Google’S Character.Ai Deal Reportedly Draws Antitrust Attention

The Department of Justice is reportedly probing whether a Google artificial intelligence (AI) deal violates antitrust law. At issue is Google’s agreement with chatbot maker Character.AI to use that company’s AI technology, Bloomberg News reported Thursday (May 22), citing sources familiar with the matter. According to those sources, regulators recently informed Google they are investigating whether the company designed that agreement to avoid government merger scrutiny

PR Newswire
May 22nd, 2025
Generative Ai Market Worth $890.59 Billion By 2032- Exclusive Report By Marketsandmarkets™

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., May 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Generative AI Market is slated to expand from USD 71.36 billion in 2025 to USD 890.59 billion by 2032, at a substantial CAGR of 43.4% over the forecast period, according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™. Browse in-depth TOC on "Generative AI Market". 500 – Tables 80 - Figures 650 – Pages

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