Decagon
Engineering Manager, Research
$280K–$430K
San Francisco +1 · Manager · Full-time · Posted Sep 4, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco
New York City - Experience
- 5+ years of industry experience; 1+ years of people management experience.
About the job
Leads a research engineering team and technical roadmap, advancing conversational AI research into reliable production systems with measurable customer impact.
What you'll do
- Hire, manage, coach, and develop research engineers.
- Set technical direction and turn research ideas into focused programs with milestones and production-impact measures.
- Review technical work and ensure rigorous evaluation, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts; partner across teams to bring research into production.
What they ask for
- 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure.
- 1+ years of people management experience, with a strong individual-contributor background.
- Deep experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale.
- Track record translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes; experience developing technical talent and communicating across stakeholders.
Nice to have
- Influential research, open-source contributions, or production ML systems with significant real-world impact.
Pay
$280K – $430K USD base salary
AI focus
Leads applied conversational AI research across model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent behavior, taking research into production.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative