Senior Voice & Speech AI Research Engineer

Decagon AI, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Life Insurance

Retirement Plan (401K)

Parental Leave

Fertility benefits

Wellness stipend

Free lunches

Flexible vacation policy

Job summary

Decagon is hiring a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to design and deploy next-generation voice agents for real-time, multimodal interaction. You will own end-to-end development from idea to production, shaping streaming speech, latency, and accuracy in enterprise settings.

The role emphasizes ownership, high-impact technical decisions, and delivering measurable improvements in speech systems while collaborating with the Speech Research Team.

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 languages and environments.
• Build evaluations and ship measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, naturalness, and task outcomes.
• Optimize end-to-end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, in collaboration with Platform and Infrastructure teams.

Skills

Speech ML

Multimodal ML

Production ML

Streaming Inference

Python

Deep Learning

Model Deployment

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Decagon is hiring a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to design and deploy next-generation voice agents for real-time, multimodal interaction. You will own end-to-end development from idea to production, shaping streaming speech, latency, and accuracy in enterprise settings.

The role emphasizes ownership, high-impact technical decisions, and delivering measurable improvements in speech systems while collaborating with the Speech Research Team.