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Salary: USD 200,000 - 400,000 / annual
Decagon is a conversational AI platform powering enterprise customer support and operations for leading brands including Avis, Block, Chime, and Oura Health. The company is backed by top-tier investors including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures.
The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack that powers Decagon's conversational agents. This Research Engineer role focuses on audio and speech, responsible for building models and agent harnesses that power real-time voice agents from idea through production.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build next-generation agent harnesses optimized for streaming speech, turn-taking, interruptions, overlapping speech, and continuous interaction
- Research and train multimodal and full-duplex models that jointly understand audio, reason, and generate speech
- Improve speech recognition, voice activity detection, endpointing, and speech generation across diverse speakers, environments, domains, and languages
- Build evaluations and use production calls to ship measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, naturalness, and task outcomes
- Optimize end-to-end inference for responsiveness, throughput, stability, and cost, partnering with Voice Platform and Infrastructure teams
Required qualifications:
- 2+ years of experience in speech, audio ML, multimodal ML, or production machine learning
- Experience developing or adapting autoregressive, diffusion, flow-matching, or codec-based speech models
- Hands-on experience with streaming agent systems, low-latency inference, production model serving, and evaluation on real-world audio
- Fluency in Python and modern deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch
- Strong foundations in machine learning and signal processing
- Track record of taking research ideas from prototype to reliable, measurable production impact
Preferred qualifications include familiarity with speech-to-speech or full-duplex models, telephony, multilingual speech, noisy-channel robustness, speaker adaptation, or expressive speech generation.
Decagon is an in-office company driven by shared commitment to excellence and velocity. The company offers comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage, life insurance, disability benefits, 401K, parental leave, fertility benefits, wellness stipend, daily lunches and snacks, and flexible vacation policy.
About Decagon
AI / Data / Infrastructure; SaaS / Enterprise Software — AI agents for customer support and enterprise operations.
