Engineering Manager, Research

Decagon • San Francisco, CA

3d • $280,000 - $430,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for a manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research. You’ll own the team and technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, driving ambitious ideas from research to reliable production impact. Managers here operate with high ownership and technical depth while helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar. You’ll create clarity in ambiguous research areas, develop exceptional engineers, and align the team’s work with the product outcomes that matter most to customers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure
• 1+ years of people management experience, with a strong individual-contributor background
• Deep experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale
• Strong technical judgment and a track record of translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders

Nice To Haves

• A record of influential research, open-source contributions, or production ML systems with significant real-world impact

Responsibilities

• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of research engineers through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development
• Own the technical direction and roadmap for your area, prioritizing the highest-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems
• Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with clear hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact
• Stay close to the technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution
• Set a high bar for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts
• Partner across Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production

Benefits

• 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
• Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
• Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed