Senior AI Safety Research Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

Retirement Plan (401K/pension)

Parental Leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches and snacks in office

Generous vacation policy

Job summary

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

We hire strong engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and make high‑impact technical decisions to advance applied AI safety in production.

Qualifications

• 4+ 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 modern 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

Job description

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

We hire strong engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and make high‑impact technical decisions to advance applied AI safety in production.