# Engineering Manager, Research

**Company:** [Decagon](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/decagon)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $280k – $430k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Machine Learning, Language Models, Speech, AI Agents, Model Infrastructure, Model Post-Training, Model Evaluation, Foundation Models, Python, Research Engineering, Experimental Design, Model Deployment, Model Serving, Open Source
**Posted:** 2026-09-04

> Leads and grows a research engineering team developing and productionizing conversational AI models and agent systems. The role requires substantial machine-learning systems experience, foundation-model expertise, and people-management experience.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of research engineers through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
- Own the technical direction and roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior.
- Prioritize high-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems.
- Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact.
- Stay close to technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution.
- Establish standards for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts.
- Partner with Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production.

## Requirements
- 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.
- Strong technical judgment and a track record of translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes.
- Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent.
- Clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.

## Nice to Have
- Influential research, open-source contributions, or production machine-learning systems with significant real-world impact.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $280,000–$430,000, 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.

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