Senior Research Engineer

Decagon Decagon · Vertical AI · New York, NY · 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, 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 fluency in Python and ML tooling.

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

  • Python
  • modern ML tooling (training, evaluation, data pipelines)

Nice to have

  • instruction following
  • retrieval
  • memory
  • long-horizon task completion
  • orchestration
  • evaluation

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or research
  • Prior experience 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
  • shipping real improvements
  • high-impact technical decisions
  • improving core conversational capabilities in production
  • end-to-end models and pipelines
  • integrating new models into production systems
  • taking research ideas from prototype to production