Research Engineering Manager (AI)

Location: San Francisco or New York City; in-office work in the United States

Salary: $280,000–$430,000 annually 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

• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of research engineers through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Own the technical direction and roadmap across model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems.
• Turn open-ended research ideas into focused programs with hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measurable production impact.
• Review architectures and experiments, debug systems, and contribute directly to technical work.
• Set standards for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure.
• 1+ years of people management experience combined with a strong individual-contributor background.
• Deep experience with post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale.
• Strong technical judgment and experience translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Ability to work in-office in San Francisco or New York City.

Nice to have

• Influential research, open-source contributions, or production machine-learning systems with significant real-world impact.

Culture & Benefits

• In-office environment focused on excellence and velocity.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for employees and families.
• Life insurance, disability benefits, retirement plan, and parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building benefits, wellness stipend, daily office meals and snacks.
• Take-what-you-need vacation policy, subject to local requirements.