Engineering Manager, ML Research & Production Equity

Speedrun Talent Network; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 430,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Life Insurance

Disability Benefits

401K / Pension

Parental Leave

Fertility and family benefits

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches

Vacation policy, flexible

Job summary

Decagon is seeking a manager to lead and grow a research team focused on model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior. You will own the technical roadmap, drive ambitious ideas to reliable production impact, and mentor engineers while maintaining high quality standards.

You'll partner with Infrastructure, Platform, Product, and customer-facing teams to translate research into scalable, real-world solutions for enterprise AI agents.

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

Language models

Post-training evaluation

Job description

Decagon is seeking a manager to lead and grow a research team focused on model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior. You will own the technical roadmap, drive ambitious ideas to reliable production impact, and mentor engineers while maintaining high quality standards.

You'll partner with Infrastructure, Platform, Product, and customer-facing teams to translate research into scalable, real-world solutions for enterprise AI agents.