Decagon
Senior Research Engineer, Safety
$200K–$400K
San Francisco +1 · Senior · Full-time · Posted Sep 4, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco
New York City - Experience
- 4+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety.
About the job
Build and deploy evaluations, models, and safeguards to make Decagon’s conversational AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable in production.
What you'll do
- Research and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments.
- Create adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites; analyze production incidents and measure mitigations.
- Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards, collaborating across teams on scalable rollout practices.
What they ask for
- Hands-on experience evaluating, post-training, or deploying language models or agentic systems.
- Experience with modern post-training techniques, such as reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, and synthetic-data generation.
- Experience with adversarial testing, model red teaming, prompt injection, policy enforcement, privacy, or safe tool use.
- Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling, with strong experimental judgment and ability to ship production systems.
Nice to have
- Experience building safeguards for high-stakes or regulated enterprise workflows.
- Familiarity with human-in-the-loop review, incident response, or responsible rollout frameworks for ML systems.
Pay
$200K – $400K (USD; base salary)
Tools
Python
AI focus
Applied AI safety for conversational agents, including evaluations, post-training, red teaming, and runtime safeguards.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative