Lead the development of models and algorithms for Decagon's real-time voice agents in a collaborative, onsite environment.
Posted by employer 3 months ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 week ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Role intensity
70% hands-on coding
AI in the day-to-day
We research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation.
Requirements
- Experience
- 6+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In the role of Senior Research Engineer for Voice and Speech at Decagon, the individual will focus on developing and refining models and algorithms that enhance the performance of real-time voice agents. Key skills include expertise in AI/ML engineering, particularly in deploying large language models, along with proficiency in Python and modern machine learning tools. This position is ideal for seasoned professionals with a strong background in AI who are comfortable leading projects and mentoring others. Decagon emphasizes a collaborative environment where team members are empowered to drive impactful technical decisions.
Joblaze insights
- Listed 9 days ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Decagon's career page.
- Decagon has 141 other open roles including Field Marketing Coordinator, Technical Accounting & Financial Reporting Manager, Director of Solutions Engineering, Enterprise East.
- 6536 active Python roles on Joblaze right now.
- 5144 active AI/ML roles on Joblaze right now.
- Salary band is in line with the typical range for AI/ML roles (median ~$188,000).
- Pays more than 79% of the 3233 salaried Python roles we track (median $160,000). See Python salary trends
Quick facts
- Is the Senior 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 6 years of relevant experience for this Senior 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: AI/ML, Python.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Decagon targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Senior Research Engineer, Audio and Speech role at Decagon.
From the original posting
About Decagon
Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.
Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.
We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.
We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team.
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
4+ 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
Benefits
We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:
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
Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)
These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.