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DecagonDecagonNew York, NY

Senior Research Engineer, Voice + Speech

Senior Research Engineer leading development of real-time voice and speech models for conversational AI agents. Owns end-to-end research, training, deployment, and production integration of LLMs focused on speech understanding, turn-taking, and task completion. Requires 6+ years AI/ML experience with production LLM deployment.

200k – 400k/yr
On-site6+ YOEML Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Lead research and engineering efforts to improve core conversational capabilities in production, including instruction following, retrieval, memory, and long-horizon task completion.
  • Build and iterate on end-to-end models and pipelines that optimize for quality, efficiency, and user experience.
  • Partner with platform and product engineers to integrate new models into production systems.
  • Break down ambiguous research ideas into clear, iterative milestones and roadmaps.
  • Mentor other researchers/engineers, set technical direction, and establish best practices for applied research and engineering.
  • Own multi-quarter initiatives that advance speech understanding, naturalness, turn-taking, and resilience in real-world conditions.
  • Design and implement frontier approaches for training, evaluation, and orchestration across the voice agent.

Requirements

  • 6+ 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).
  • Track record of taking research ideas from prototype → reliable, measurable production impact.
  • Ability to define a roadmap, break ambiguity into milestones, and lead cross-functional execution.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Experience with voice and speech models/algorithms (speech understanding, naturalness, turn-taking).

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation $200K – $400K + equity.

Benefits

  • Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family.
  • Life Insurance and Disability Benefits.
  • Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension).
  • Parental Leave.
  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot.
  • Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance.
  • Daily lunches and snacks in the office.
  • Take what you need vacation policy.

Skills

LLMsPythonMachine Learningspeech understandingnatural language processingModel TrainingModel EvaluationData Pipelinesai research

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