AI Safety Research Engineer — Production-Ready

Decagon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Retirement plan

Parental leave

Fertility support

Free lunches

Job summary

Decagon is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Safety to make its AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable from evaluation through production. You will identify real-world failure modes and build models, evaluations, and safeguards to prevent them.

You will own end-to-end delivery, ship real improvements, and collaborate with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer teams to convert enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety.
• Hands-on experience evaluating, post-training, or deploying language models or agentic systems.
• Experience with post-training techniques, such as reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, and synthetic-data generation.
• Experience with adversarial testing, model red teaming, prompt injection, policy enforcement, privacy, or safe tool use.
• Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling, with strong experimental judgment and the engineering depth to ship production systems.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and making clear risk and product tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Research and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments.
• Build adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by production failures.
• Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior.
• Analyze production traces and incidents to identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure their impact.
• Partner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices.

Skills

Python

AI safety

Experimentation

Risk assessment

Job description

Decagon is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Safety to make its AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable from evaluation through production. You will identify real-world failure modes and build models, evaluations, and safeguards to prevent them.

You will own end-to-end delivery, ship real improvements, and collaborate with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer teams to convert enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards.