Senior Research Engineer, Safety
$200k - $400k • 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 Senior Research Engineer focused on Safety to join their conversational AI platform team. This role is crucial for ensuring the reliability and controllability of Decagon's AI agents from evaluation through production. You will be responsible for identifying real-world failure modes and developing the necessary models, evaluations, and safeguards to prevent them. This is an opportunity for strong engineers to advance applied AI safety in a production environment, owning their work end-to-end and making high-impact technical decisions.
Responsibilities
- Research and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments.
- Build adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by production failures.
- Develop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior.
- Analyze production traces and incidents to identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure their impact.
- Partner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to translate enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety.
- Hands-on experience evaluating, post-training, or deploying language models or agentic systems.
- Experience with modern post-training techniques such as reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, and synthetic-data generation.
- Experience with adversarial testing, model red teaming, prompt injection, policy enforcement, privacy, or safe tool use.
- Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling, with strong experimental judgment and engineering depth to ship production systems.
- Comfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and making clear risk and product tradeoffs.
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