Engineering Manager, Research
$280k - $430k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 9d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Decagon is seeking a Manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research, focusing on areas like model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior. This role involves owning the team and technical roadmap, driving ambitious ideas from research to production impact. Managers at Decagon operate with high ownership and technical depth, helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar. You will create clarity in ambiguous research areas, develop exceptional engineers, and align the team's work with product outcomes that matter most to customers.
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 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.
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, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
Benefits
- Equity
- Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
- Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
- Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
- Parental Leave
- Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
- Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
- Daily lunches and snacks in the office
- Take what you need vacation policy