Staff Research Engineer, Voice + Speech

Decagon
New York, US
On-site

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior AI/ML engineers with production deployment experience who thrive in in-office environments focused on conversational AI.

Best fit for

  • Senior engineers who have shipped LLMs to production and enjoy mentoring others.
    — “8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research
  • Research engineers comfortable breaking down ambiguous ideas into executable roadmaps.
    — “Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones
  • Voice AI specialists who measure success through real user satisfaction metrics.
    — “We measure success the way customers feel it

Things to consider

  • Mandatory in-office presence in New York with daily lunches provided.
    — “We’re an in-office company
  • Multi-quarter initiative ownership requires comfort with long-term project cycles.
    — “own multi-quarter initiatives that advance speech understanding

How to stand out

  • Quantify production impact metrics from prior LLM deployments in your resume.
    — “reliable, measurable production impact
  • Showcase cross-functional collaboration examples beyond pure research prototypes.
    — “Partner with platform and product engineers
  • Highlight voice-specific model optimization experience beyond general NLP work.
    — “real-time voice agents
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · TeamLevel · Senior

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • Improving conversational capabilities in production
  • Building and iterating on end-to-end models
Typical background
8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research

Skills & requirements

Required

Ai/ml EngineeringPythonModern ML ToolingLlms In ProductionResearch To Production

Preferred

LLM TrainingNatural Language Processing

Stack & domain

PythonModern Ml ToolingTrainingEvaluationData PipelinesLeadershipCommunicationProblem-solvingDecision-makingAIMLConversational AiEnterprise Support

About the role

Original posting from Decagon via Ashby

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.

Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.

We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.

We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team.

About the Team

Read more about the research team's work here: https://decagon.ai/blog/introducing-decagon-labs

The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack that powers Decagon’s conversational agents for enterprise support. We research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation in order to make our agents more accurate, robust, and efficient in real-world deployments.

Our goal is to push the frontier of applied conversational AI: agents that reliably understand nuanced intent, track long context, and take the right actions under uncertainty. We measure success the way customers feel it: higher resolution rates, better user satisfaction, and consistent behavior at scale.

About the Role

As a Voice Research Engineer, you’ll lead the development of the models and algorithms that power Decagon’s industry-leading, real-time voice agents, and drive them all the way into production. You’ll own multi-quarter initiatives that advance speech understanding, naturalness, turn-taking, and resilience in real-world conditions. You’ll design and implement frontier approaches for training, evaluation, and orchestration across the voice agent.

We’re looking for strong engineers who want to build the core models and algorithms behind our AI agents. People here own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and are trusted to make high-impact technical decisions.

In this role, you will

  • 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
  • Partner with platform and product engineers to integrate new models into production systems
  • Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones and roadmaps.
  • Mentor other researchers/engineers, set technical direction, and establish best practices for applied research and engineering

Your background looks something like this

  • 8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research.
  • Prior experience post-training and deploying LLMs in production environments.
  • Fluency in Python and 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

Compensation

$200K – $400K + Offers Equity

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:

  • Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)
  • Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
  • Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
  • Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
  • Parental Leave
  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
  • Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best

These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.

Source: Decagon careers (Ashby)

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