Senior Research Engineer

Decagon Decagon · Vertical AI · San Francisco, CA · Engineering

Senior Research Engineer at Decagon, a conversational AI platform company. The role focuses on building and deploying industry-leading conversational AI models and agents, from idea to production. Responsibilities include improving core conversational capabilities (instruction following, retrieval, memory, long-horizon task completion), building end-to-end models and pipelines, and integrating new models into production systems. Requires 5+ years of AI/ML experience, prior experience post-training and deploying LLMs in production, and a track record of delivering measurable production impact from research ideas.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead research and engineering efforts to improve core conversational capabilities in production, including instruction following, retrieval, memory, and long-horizon task completion
  2. Build and iterate on end-to-end models and pipelines that optimize for quality, efficiency, and user experience
  3. Partner with platform and product engineers to integrate new models into production systems
  4. Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones and roadmaps.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research
  • Prior experience post-training and deploying LLMs in production environments
  • Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling (training, evaluation, data pipelines)

Nice to have

  • experience with instruction following
  • experience with retrieval
  • experience with memory
  • experience with long-horizon task completion

What the JD emphasized

  • post-training and deploying LLMs in production environments
  • Track record of taking research ideas from prototype → reliable, measurable production impact

Other signals

  • building core models and algorithms
  • taking research ideas from prototype to production
  • improving core conversational capabilities in production