Staff Research Engineer, Voice + Speech

About the role

As a 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

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
• Able to define a roadmap, break ambiguity into milestones, and lead cross-functional execution

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or related field
• Experience with large-scale machine learning and deep learning frameworks
• Strong understanding of natural language processing and speech recognition
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud-based infrastructure

Skills

• Python programming
• Machine learning and deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Speech Recognition
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Infrastructure

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
• Retail 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

Pay

$200K – $400K + Offers Equity

Schedule

In-office