Decagon

conversational AI

StaffResearchEngineer,Voice+Speech

$200–400k New York, New York, United States FULL TIME
The Brief

“Staff Research Engineer, Voice + Speech at Decagon. Skills: Voice Research Engineering, conversational AI, LLMs, model development, algorithm development. Lead research and engineering efforts to improve core conversational capabilities in production, including instruction following, retrieval, memory, and long-horizon task completion. Build and iterate on end-to-end models and pipelines that optimize for quality, efficiency, and user experience”

What You'll Achieve.

agents that reliably understand nuanced intent, track long context, and take the right actions under uncertainty; higher resolution rates; better user satisfaction; consistent behavior at scale; ship real improvements; make high-impact technical decisions

Industry & Context.

conversational AI
Problems you'll solve

break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones and roadmaps

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research, Prior experience post-training and deploying LLMs in production environments, Fluency in Python, Fluency in modern ML tooling (training, evaluation, data pipelines), Track record of taking research ideas from prototype → reliable, measurable production impact, Ability to define a roadmap, break ambiguity into milestones, and lead cross-functional execution

What You'll Do.

Lead research and engineering efforts to improve core conversational capabilities in production

including instruction following

and long-horizon task completion

Build and iterate on end-to-end models and pipelines that optimize for quality

Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear

iterative milestones and roadmaps

Develop the models and algorithms that power Decagon’s industry-leading

real-time voice agents

Drive models all the way into production

Own multi-quarter initiatives that advance speech understanding

and resilience in real-world conditions

Design and implement frontier approaches for training

and orchestration across the voice agent

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Partner with platform and product engineers to integrate new models into production systems; Mentor other researchers/engineers; set technical direction; establish best practices for applied research and engineering

Process & Methodology

Ability to define a roadmap, break ambiguity into milestones, lead cross-functional execution

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