Senior Research Engineer, Voice + Speech

Decagon•San Francisco, CA

12d•$200,000 - $400,000•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

5+ 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

Responsibilities

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