Staff Research Engineer

Decagon

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 300,000 - 450,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Take what you need vacation policy

Daily lunches, dinners and snacks in the office

Job summary

A leading conversational AI platform in San Francisco seeks an AI/ML Engineer to build advanced systems for unprecedented performance. The ideal candidate will have over 8 years of experience and a strong track record in AI/ML projects. You'll design state-of-the-art methods, develop models for customer support, and tackle complex challenges while working in a dynamic environment. The position offers substantial compensation and innovative benefits, making it an exciting opportunity in the AI field.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research.
Proven track record of AI/ML projects from concept to production.
Experience fine-tuning and deploying LLMs in production.

Responsibilities

Develop models for customer support tasks exceeding closed source models.
Experiment with small open-source models to reduce latency.
Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear milestones.

Skills

AI/ML engineering

Instruction tuning

Information retrieval

Machine learning code

Multi-modal models

Job description

About Decagon

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experience. Our AI agents provide intelligent, human-like responses across chat, email, and voice, resolving millions of customer inquiries across every language and at any time.

Since coming out of stealth, Decagon has experienced rapid growth. We partner with industry leaders like Hertz, Eventbrite, Duolingo, Oura, Bilt, Curology, and Samsara to redefine customer experience at scale. We\u2019ve raised over $200M from Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, a16z, BOND Capital, A*, Elad Gil, and notable angels such as the founders of Box, Airtable, Rippling, Okta, Lattice, and Klaviyo.

We\u2019re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values—customers are everything, relentless momentum, winner\u2019s mindset, and stronger together—shape how we work and grow as a team.

About the Team

The Research team at Decagon innovates on building the most advanced conversational AI agents for enterprise customers. Decagon\u2019s AI agents understand context, respond with genuine empathy, and solve complex problems with surgical precision.

Our mission is to deliver magical support experiences — AI agents working alongside human agents to help users resolve their issues.

About the Role

On the Research team, you\u2019ll be responsible for building AI systems that can perform previously impossible tasks or achieve unprecedented levels of performance. You will design and implement state of the art methods for instruction tuning and information retrieval. We\u2019re looking for people with strong engineering skills, writing bug-free machine learning code, and building the science behind the algorithms that power our AI agents.

Engineers here own their work end-to-end and are trusted to make a real impact. This role is for someone who dives deep into complex system challenges, builds elegant solutions that scale to millions of users, and creates automation that prevents problems before they happen.

In this role, you will

Develop models for customer support tasks that exceed the performance of closed source models
Experiment with small open-source models to drive order of magnitude reductions in latency across channels
Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones and roadmaps.

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