Research Engineer, Safety

Decagon • San Francisco, CA

7d • $200,000 - $400,000 • Onsite

About The Position

As a Research Engineer focused on Safety, you’ll be responsible for making Decagon’s AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable, from evaluation through production. You’ll identify real-world failure modes and build the models, evaluations, and safeguards that prevent them. We’re looking for strong engineers who want to advance applied AI safety in production. People here own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and are trusted to make high-impact technical decisions.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety
• Hands-on experience evaluating, post-training, or deploying language models or agentic systems
• Experience with modern post-training techniques, such as reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, and synthetic-data generation
• Experience with adversarial testing, model red teaming, prompt injection, policy enforcement, privacy, or safe tool use
• Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling, with strong experimental judgment and the engineering depth to ship production systems
• Comfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and making clear risk and product tradeoffs

Nice To Haves

• Experience building safeguards for high-stakes or regulated enterprise workflows
• Familiarity with human-in-the-loop review, incident response, or responsible rollout frameworks for ML systems

Responsibilities

• Research and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments
• Build adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by production failures
• Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior
• Analyze production traces and incidents to identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure their impact
• Partner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices

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: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed