Joblaze summary

In the role of Research Engineer for Audio and Speech at Decagon, the individual will focus on developing and optimizing models for real-time voice agents, ensuring they can effectively handle natural interactions. Key skills include expertise in speech and audio machine learning, proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, and experience with low-latency inference systems. This position is ideal for engineers with a solid background in machine learning who are eager to take ownership of projects and drive impactful results in a fast-paced environment.

Joblaze insights

Listed about a month ago — first seen on Joblaze September 5, 2026. Last confirmed on Decagon's careers page November 2, 2026.
Salary band is in line with the typical range for AI/ML roles (median ~$190,000).
Starts above 80% of 119 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States that list Python we track (median $150,000 across 53 companies). See Python salary trends
Python appears in 49.9% of 471 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States; Signal Processing appears in 0.2% of 471 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States.

Quick facts

Is the Research Engineer, Audio and Speech role remote?: No — this is an on-site role in San Francisco.
What's the salary range?: Decagon lists $200,000–$400,000 for this role.
How much experience is required?: At least 2 years of relevant experience for this Research Engineer, Audio and Speech role.
Where is the role based?: Decagon is hiring for this position in San Francisco.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Machine Learning, PyTorch, Python, Signal Processing, Speech Recognition, audio ML.
What seniority level is this role?: Decagon targets mid-level candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Research Engineer, Audio and Speech role at Decagon.

From the original posting

About the Team

Read more about the Speech Research Team's work:

The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack that powers Decagon’s conversational agents for enterprise support. We research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation in order to make our agents more accurate, robust, and efficient in real-world deployments.

Our goal is to push the frontier of applied conversational AI: agents that reliably understand nuanced intent, track long context, and take the right actions under uncertainty. We measure success the way customers feel it: higher resolution rates, better user satisfaction, and consistent behavior at scale.

About the Role

As a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech, you’ll be responsible for building the models and agent harnesses that power Decagon’s real-time voice agents and taking them all the way from idea to production. Your work will advance multimodal and full-duplex systems that can listen, reason, speak, and respond naturally in real time.

We’re looking for strong engineers who want to build the next generation of AI voice agents. People here own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and are trusted to make high-impact technical decisions.

In this role, you will

Design and build next-generation agent harnesses optimized for streaming speech, turn-taking, interruptions, overlapping speech, and continuous interaction
Research and train multimodal and full-duplex models that jointly understand audio, reason, and generate speech
Improve speech recognition, voice activity detection, endpointing, and speech generation across diverse speakers, environments, domains, and languages
Build evaluations and use production calls to ship measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, naturalness, and task outcomes
Optimize end-to-end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, partnering with Voice Platform and Infrastructure teams to deploy at scale

Your background looks something like this

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
A track record of taking research ideas from prototype to reliable, measurable production impact

Even better if you have

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

Compensation

$200K – $400K + Offers Equity

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
Parental Leave
Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

Standard company text repeated across Decagon's postings is omitted here.

Research Engineer, Audio and Speech

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