AI Research Engineering Lead

Decagon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 280,000 - 430,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Retirement Plan

Parental Leave

Equity

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches

Generous vacation

Job summary

Decagon is seeking a manager to lead and grow a team within the Decagon Research group. You’ll own the team and roadmap across model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, guiding research toward reliable production impact.

Managers here combine ownership with deep technical work, building exceptional engineers and aligning work with customer-focused product outcomes. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale research into production.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure.
• 1+ years of people management experience, with a strong individual-contributor background.
• Deep experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale.
• Strong technical judgment and a track record of 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.

Responsibilities

• 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 for your area, prioritizing the highest-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems.
• Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with clear hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact.
• Stay close to the technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution.
• Set a high bar for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts.
• Partner across Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production.

Skills

ML systems

People management

Post-training evaluation

Model infrastructure

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Decagon is seeking a manager to lead and grow a team within the Decagon Research group. You’ll own the team and roadmap across model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, guiding research toward reliable production impact.

Managers here combine ownership with deep technical work, building exceptional engineers and aligning work with customer-focused product outcomes. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale research into production.