Research Engineer (Audio and Speech)

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

Salary: $200K–$400K plus equity

Company

Decagon provides a conversational AI platform for enterprise customer experiences across voice, chat, email, SMS, and other channels.

What you will do

• Design and build agent harnesses for streaming speech, turn-taking, interruptions, overlapping speech, and continuous interaction.
• Research and train multimodal and full-duplex models that understand audio, reason, and generate speech.
• Improve speech recognition, voice activity detection, endpointing, and speech generation across speakers, environments, domains, and languages.
• Build evaluations using production calls to improve accuracy, latency, naturalness, and task outcomes.
• Optimize end-to-end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, collaborating with Voice Platform and Infrastructure teams.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in speech, audio ML, multimodal ML, or production machine learning.
• Experience developing or adapting autoregressive, diffusion, flow-matching, or codec-based speech models.
• Hands-on experience with streaming agent systems, low-latency inference, production model serving, and evaluation on real-world audio.
• Fluency in Python and a modern deep-learning framework such as PyTorch, with strong foundations in machine learning and signal processing.
• Experience taking research ideas from prototype to reliable, measurable production impact.

Nice to have

• Experience with speech-to-speech or full-duplex models.
• Experience with telephony, multilingual speech, noisy-channel robustness, speaker adaptation, or expressive speech generation.

Culture & Benefits

• In-office environment focused on execution, innovation, customer impact, and technical ownership.
• Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits for full-time employees.
• Retirement plan, parental leave, and fertility and family-building benefits.
• Monthly wellness and lifestyle stipend, daily office lunches and snacks, and flexible vacation.