Staff Research Engineer, Voice

Decagon
San Francisco2026-01-27Hybrid

About the job

As a Staff 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.

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

Qualifications

Minimum

- 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

Preferred

No preferred qualifications listed.