CHAI AI

Palo Alto | Small AI Startup | Top Pay, 100% Cash | Actively Hiring Engineers CHAI AI is a small, 20-person AI startup in Palo Alto building a social AI platform, where millions of people create, share, and chat with AI characters. As of September 2026, CHAI has 10 million active users and $100M in annual recurring revenue, and has grown 3x year-over-year for three consecutive years. We have raised over $55M from investors including AMD and CoreWeave. Our engineers work on hard, production-scale AI problems: Post-training: SFT, reinforcement learning, reranking, and data curation for roleplay LLMs, driven by live user-retention signals. Model serving: routing a fleet of LLMs per conversation turn, and optimizing latency and cost-per-token on our own GPU clusters. Memory: systems that let AI characters remember users across hundreds of conversations. Product: full-stack and backend engineering for a consumer app used by millions. CHAI was founded in 2021 by a team of Cambridge-educated former quantitative traders and researchers. Top pay, 100% cash. We benchmark against total compensation at Meta, Google, and OpenAI, then pay that number in cash instead of equity. Engineering offers range $450K to $900K per year. Candidates can optionally trade part of their cash for stock options. Small team, huge scope. Engineering is 15–20 people with a flat structure. Every engineer owns an entire product area end-to-end, from prototype to production, with clear metrics and direct impact on 10 million users. Real scale, real results. You ship to millions of users and see the effect of your work in the data, whether that is retention, revenue, or model quality. Fast, practical hiring. No leetcode and no recruiter screens. The process is a 20-minute call with our founder or an engineer, a 60–90 minute take-home, and a one-day onsite. We can make an offer within 7 days of first contact. Actively hiring: ML Engineers, Research Engineers (Post-Training), Applied Research Scientists, Infrastructure Engineers, Full-Stack Engineers, and Back-End Engineers. All roles are in person at our Palo Alto office (555 Hamilton Ave). Investor sources: AMD Ventures portfolio: https://www.amd.com/en/ventures/portfolio.html CoreWeave investment announcement: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coreweave_we-are-happy-to-announce-that-we-are-furthering-activity-7114654559196602368-09n3 Dated company disclosures: https://www.chai-research.com/company-facts/