Engineering Manager, Research

We’re looking for a manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research. You’ll own the team and technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, driving ambitious ideas from research to reliable production impact.

Managers here operate with high ownership and technical depth while helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar. You’ll create clarity in ambiguous research areas, develop exceptional engineers, and align the team’s work with the product outcomes that matter most to customers.

In this role, you will

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 your area, prioritizing the highest-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems

Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with clear hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact

Stay close to the technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution

Set a high bar for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts

Partner across Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production

Your background looks something like this

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, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders

Even better if you have

A record of influential research, open-source contributions, or production ML systems with significant real-world impact

Compensation

$280K – $430K + Offers Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.