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Salary: USD 280,000 - 430,000 / annual
Decagon is a conversational AI platform enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents for customer support and operations. The company works with industry leaders like Avis, Block, Chime, and Oura Health, delivering personalized interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and other channels. Backed by a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, Decagon is redefining customer experience from support tickets to faster resolutions and deeper relationships.
The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack powering Decagon's conversational agents. They research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation to make agents more accurate, robust, and efficient in real-world deployments. Success is measured by customer outcomes: higher resolution rates, better user satisfaction, and consistent behavior at scale.
You will lead and grow a research team owning the technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior. You'll operate with high ownership and technical depth, creating clarity in ambiguous research areas, developing exceptional engineers, and aligning work with product outcomes that matter to customers.
Key responsibilities include building and managing a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and career development; owning technical direction and roadmap prioritizing highest-leverage investments; turning open-ended research into focused programs with clear hypotheses and milestones; staying close to technical work through architecture reviews and debugging; setting high bars for experimental rigor and safe model rollouts; and partnering across Infrastructure, Platform, Product, and customer teams to move research into production.
Required background: 5+ years building ML systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure; 1+ years people management with strong IC background; deep experience post-training, evaluating, or deploying foundation models at scale; strong technical judgment translating research into measurable outcomes; experience hiring and developing technical talent with clear cross-functional communication.
Ideal candidates have influential research records, open-source contributions, or production ML systems with significant real-world impact.
About Decagon
AI / Data / Infrastructure; SaaS / Enterprise Software — AI agents for customer support and enterprise operations.
