# Senior Research Engineer, Safety

**Company:** [Decagon](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/decagon)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** AI Research
**Salary:** $200k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 4+ years
**Skills:** Python, Machine Learning, Language Models, Agentic Systems, Reinforcement Learning, Preference Optimization, Distillation, Model Routing, Synthetic Data, Red Teaming, Prompt Injection, Privacy, Safe Tool Use, Incident Response
**Posted:** 2026-09-04

> Research and build safety models, evaluations, and runtime safeguards for conversational AI agents, addressing prompt injection, unsafe tool use, privacy, and policy risks. Requires 4+ years in AI/ML engineering, research, or safety plus experience deploying and evaluating language models or agentic systems.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Research and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments.
- Build adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by production failures.
- Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior.
- Analyze production traces and incidents to identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure their impact.
- Partner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices.

## Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety.
- 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 machine learning tooling, with strong experimental judgment and engineering depth to ship production systems.
- Ability to own ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and make clear risk and product tradeoffs.

## 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 machine learning systems.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $200,000–$400,000, plus equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for employees and families.
- Life insurance and disability benefits.
- Retirement plan.
- Parental leave.
- Fertility and family-building benefits.
- Monthly wellness and lifestyle stipend.
- Daily office lunches and snacks.
- Flexible vacation policy.

## Similar jobs

- [Senior Software Engineer, AI](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/7e214d55-30ad-4109-b1dd-90ef20e63df1) - Maybern - New York, NY - $180k – $230k/yr
- [Senior Product Builder, Organizational Intelligence](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/055a44bc-2ab2-4d24-bc52-ab326cc477fb) - Vanta - Remote - $176k – $207k/yr
- [Senior Research Scientist, Open Ecosystem](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c6703bf2-8e4d-44a2-b14a-da5e3e6b4dc0) - Ai2 - Seattle, WA - $170k – $270k/yr
- [Senior ML Research Scientist](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/39a4097c-efbc-478b-8173-1c90e3be578a) - Rad AI - Remote - $170k – $220k/yr
- [AI Solutions Architect](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/e4b5119d-ef06-4f6a-9eed-e53f14f7406a) - Gusto - Denver, CO - $168k – $247k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/895361c1-4855-4f5a-8be7-da7e4af996f6
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/895361c1-4855-4f5a-8be7-da7e4af996f6