Senior Speech AI Engineer – Real-Time Voice

Decagon; New York (NY); 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 (e.g., 401K)

Parental Leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Monthly wellness stipend

Daily lunches and snacks

Take what you need vacation policy (UK

25 days statutory leave (UK)

Job summary

Decagon, an in‑office AI company in the United States, is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build real‑time voice agents and production‑ready systems.

You will own end‑to‑end development from idea to deployment, advancing multimodal and full‑duplex models that listen, reason, speak, and respond in real time.

Strong engineers with 4+ years in speech, Python, and PyTorch will thrive; collaboration with platform and infrastructure teams is essential.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in speech, audio ML, multimodal ML, or production machine learning.
• Experience developing or adapting autoregressive, diffusion, flow‑matching, or codec‑based speech models.
• Hands‑on experience with streaming agent systems, low‑latency inference, production model serving, and evaluation on real‑world audio.
• Fluency in Python and a modern deep‑learning framework such as PyTorch, with strong foundations in machine learning and signal processing.
• A track record of taking research ideas from prototype to reliable, measurable production impact.

Responsibilities

• Design and build next‑generation agent harnesses optimized for streaming speech and turn‑taking.
• Research and train multimodal and full‑duplex models that understand audio and generate speech.
• Improve speech recognition, voice activity detection, endpointing, and speech generation across diverse speakers and languages.
• Build evaluations and use production calls to ship measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, and outcomes.
• Optimize end‑to‑end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, partnering with Voice Platform and Infra teams.

Skills

Speech ML

Multimodal ML

Streaming inference

Python / PyTorch

Production deployment

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Decagon, an in‑office AI company in the United States, is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build real‑time voice agents and production‑ready systems.

You will own end‑to‑end development from idea to deployment, advancing multimodal and full‑duplex models that listen, reason, speak, and respond in real time.

Strong engineers with 4+ years in speech, Python, and PyTorch will thrive; collaboration with platform and infrastructure teams is essential.