Research Engineer (AI Safety)

Location: In-office in San Francisco or New York City, United States

Salary: $200,000–$400,000 per year plus equity

Company

Decagon develops a conversational AI platform that enables enterprises to deliver personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, email, SMS, and other channels.

What you will do

• 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 based on production failures.
• Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior.
• Analyze production traces and incidents, identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure impact.
• Partner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to develop scalable safeguards and rollout practices.

Requirements

• 4+ 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 reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, or 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 the engineering depth to ship production systems.
• Ability to own ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and make clear risk and product tradeoffs.

Nice to have

• 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.

Culture & Benefits

• In-office work environment focused on excellence and velocity.
• Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits for employees and families.
• Retirement plan, parental leave, and fertility and family-building benefits.
• Monthly wellness and lifestyle stipend.
• Daily office lunches and snacks.
• Take-what-you-need vacation policy, subject to local requirements.