# Senior Research Engineer, Voice + Speech

**Company:** [Decagon](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/decagon)
**Location:** New York, NY, San Francisco, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $200k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 6+ years
**Skills:** LLMs, Python, Machine Learning, speech understanding, natural language processing, Model Training, Model Evaluation, Data Pipelines, ai research
**Posted:** 2026-05-18

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

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