AI Research Engineering Manager — Lead Scalable Impact

Decagon; New York (NY); On-site; USD 280,000 - 430,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

Life Insurance

Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K)

Parental Leave

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches in the office

Job summary

Decagon, the leading conversational AI platform, is seeking a manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research. You'll own the team and technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, driving ambitious ideas from research to reliable production impact.

Managers here operate with high ownership and technical depth while helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure.
• 1+ years of people management experience with a strong IC background.
• Experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale.
• Strong technical judgment and track record translating ambiguous ideas into measurable outcomes.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent with cross-functional communication.

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 high-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

Language models

People management

Model infrastructure

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Decagon, the leading conversational AI platform, is seeking a manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research. You'll own the team and technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, driving ambitious ideas from research to reliable production impact.

Managers here operate with high ownership and technical depth while helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar.