Voice AI Research Engineer - Real-Time Speech

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

Retirement Plan (401K, pension)

Parental Leave

Fertility and family benefits

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches in the office

Take what you need vacation policy

Job summary

Decagon is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build real-time voice agents and advance multimodal, full-duplex systems. You will take ideas from concept to production, owning end-to-end delivery and shipping measurable improvements at scale.

The role requires hands-on Python and PyTorch, experience with streaming low-latency inference, and a track record of turning research into production-ready systems in an in-office environment.

Qualifications

• 2+ 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 experience

Python & PyTorch

Streaming agent systems

End-to-end production impact

Low-latency inference

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Decagon is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build real-time voice agents and advance multimodal, full-duplex systems. You will take ideas from concept to production, owning end-to-end delivery and shipping measurable improvements at scale.

The role requires hands-on Python and PyTorch, experience with streaming low-latency inference, and a track record of turning research into production-ready systems in an in-office environment.