building the team behind character.ai’s next chapter
22 key hires across AI research, engineering, product, safety, design, and marketing.
Character.AI’s roots run deep in the technology that sparked the generative AI boom. Founded by Noam Shazeer, a co-inventor of the Transformer architecture, and Daniel De Freitas, who led the development of Google’s pioneering conversational AI systems, the company brought that research directly to consumers, letting people create and interact with AI characters. By 2025, it had reached 20 million monthly active users, spending an average of 75 minutes a day on the platform. What began as a breakthrough in conversational AI was evolving into something bigger: an entertainment platform spanning interactive storytelling, creator tools, and new ways to engage with characters and worlds. Scalrr joined at that pivotal moment, helping build the team to turn that ambition into products.
During a transformative year of product expansion, Character.AI partnered with Scalrr to help build that team. Through our embedded Team Build model, we filled 22 roles across the technical and commercial functions needed to develop, deliver, and grow its products.
An ambitious roadmap. A lean recruiting team.
When the partnership began in September 2025, Character.AI had approximately 70 employees and one internal recruiter. Its hiring needs stretched across engineering, research, product, design, and marketing, with an exceptionally high bar for talent.
The challenge was finding people with the right combination of specialist expertise, product judgment, and comfort working in a fast-moving AI company. A post-training researcher, a monetization product manager, and a brand designer each required a different search strategy, and a shared understanding of the company they would be joining.
Character.AI needed a partner who could own that complexity and deliver across multiple searches without making the internal team manage another layer of recruiting.
Embedded in the team. Accountable for the search.
Scalrr embedded three recruiters through our Team Build model, working directly with hiring managers, the CEO, head of HR and their internal recruiting lead. We owned the full recruiting lifecycle: role calibration, sourcing, screening, candidate management, and offer negotiation.
We invested early in understanding the hiring bar, how teams worked, and the people who would thrive in the environment. That understanding shaped how we assessed candidates and represented the opportunity in a competitive market.
Alongside search execution, we helped refine hiring processes and feedback loops, giving the internal recruiting lead more capacity to focus on strategic priorities. As hiring expanded, the same embedded team supported searches across research, infrastructure, consumer product, safety, and go-to-market.
22 hires across the teams that build and grow AI products
These hires added capability across the product lifecycle: improving models, building the systems behind them, shaping user experiences, supporting safety, and developing monetization. The breadth of the work allowed Character.AI to address interconnected hiring needs through one recruiting partnership.
A pivotal year—and a new chapter with Disney
The partnership spanned the period leading up to a significant leadership and talent transition. On September 18, 2026, Disney announced that Character.AI CEO Karandeep would become its first Chief Technology Officer, effective October 2, and to bring on Character AI’s entire technical team.
For Scalrr, the story is the team-building work behind that year: 22 key hires, specialist searches across multiple functions, and an embedded partnership that expanded Character.AI’s ability to execute its hiring plans during a pivotal stage of product development.
For AI companies building across research, engineering, and product at once, that is what Team Build is designed to deliver: a recruiting team that understands the business, owns the work, and scales with the hiring need.
