Speech & Audio Research Engineer - Real-Time Voice AI

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 is building a leading conversational AI platform focused on real-time voice agents for enterprise support. As a Research Engineer, you will develop models and harnesses that power Decagon’s voice agents from concept to production, advancing multimodal and full-duplex systems that listen, reason, speak, and respond in real time.

We’re seeking engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship tangible improvements, and make high-impact technical decisions to push the frontier of applied

Qualifications

• 2+ years in speech, audio ML, multimodal ML, or production ML.
• Experience with autoregressive, diffusion, flow-matching, or codec-based speech models.
• Hands-on with streaming agent systems, low-latency inference, production model serving, and evaluation on real-world audio.
• Fluency in Python and PyTorch, with strong foundations in ML and signal processing.
• 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/Audio ML

Multimodal ML

Production ML

Python

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Decagon is building a leading conversational AI platform focused on real-time voice agents for enterprise support. As a Research Engineer, you will develop models and harnesses that power Decagon’s voice agents from concept to production, advancing multimodal and full-duplex systems that listen, reason, speak, and respond in real time.

We’re seeking engineers who own their work end-to-end, ship tangible improvements, and make high-impact technical decisions to push the frontier of applied