Senior Speech AI Research Engineer — Real-Time Voice

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 (e.g., 401K)

Parental Leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches and snacks

Generous vacation policy

Job summary

Decagon in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build models and agent harnesses powering real-time voice agents from idea to production. You will advance multimodal and full-duplex systems that listen, reason, speak, and respond naturally in real time.

We seek engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship tangible improvements, and make high-impact technical decisions. Strong background in speech, ML, and production systems is required.

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, turn-taking, interruptions, overlapping speech, and continuous interaction.
• Research and train multimodal and full-duplex models that jointly understand audio, reason, and generate speech.
• Improve speech recognition, voice activity detection, endpointing, and speech generation across diverse speakers, environments, domains, and languages.
• Build evaluations and use production calls to ship measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, naturalness, and task outcomes.
• Optimize end-to-end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, partnering with Voice Platform and Infrastructure teams to deploy at scale.

Skills

Speech ML

Multimodal ML

Production ML

Python

PyTorch

Signal processing

Tools

Streaming

Low-latency

Model serving

Job description

Decagon in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build models and agent harnesses powering real-time voice agents from idea to production. You will advance multimodal and full-duplex systems that listen, reason, speak, and respond naturally in real time.

We seek engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship tangible improvements, and make high-impact technical decisions. Strong background in speech, ML, and production systems is required.