Staff Research Engineer

Decagon • New York, NY

5d • Onsite

About The Position

As a Staff Research Engineer, you’ll be responsible for building industry-leading conversational AI models that power Decagon’s agent, and taking them all the way from idea to production. You’ll own multi-quarter initiatives that push the agent’s reliability, capability, and efficiency forward, and you’ll design and implement frontier approaches for training, evaluation, and orchestration across the system. 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

• 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

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

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

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