Engineering Manager, Research
Decagon
Engineering Manager, Research at Decagon is a full time role based in San Francisco, CA, United States. The listing states pay of $280k–$430k. It was published on 4 September 2026 and was open at last check.
| Role | Engineering Manager, Research |
|---|---|
| Company | Decagon |
| Location | San Francisco, CA, United States |
| Employment type | Full Time |
| Pay (as listed) | $280k–$430k |
| Published | 4 September 2026 |
| Status | Open at last check |
About Decagon
Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.
Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.
We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.
We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team.
About the Team
Read more about the research team's work here: https://decagon.ai/blog/introducing-decagon-labs
The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack that powers Decagon’s conversational agents for enterprise support. We research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation in order to make our agents more accurate, robust, and efficient in real-world deployments.
Our goal is to push the frontier of applied conversational AI: agents that reliably understand nuanced intent, track long context, and take the right actions under uncertainty. We measure success the way customers feel it: higher resolution rates, better user satisfaction, and consistent behavior at scale.
About the Role
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.
Benefits
We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:
- 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 to keep you at your best
- Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)
These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.
Create your free OnJob profile to apply — we'll take you to Decagon's application after sign-up. · Posted 4 Sept 2026.
Engineering Manager, Research at Decagon — questions answered
What does the Engineering Manager, Research role at Decagon pay?
The Engineering Manager, Research at Decagon listing states pay of $280k–$430k for the San Francisco, CA, United States position. That figure is taken directly from the employer's own posting as published, not estimated or averaged from other roles.
Where is the Engineering Manager, Research role at Decagon based?
Decagon lists this Engineering Manager, Research role in San Francisco, CA, United States, advertised as full time work at that location. Larger employers sometimes cover several sites under one city name, so confirm the exact office with Decagon before you apply.
Is the Engineering Manager, Research role at Decagon still open?
The Engineering Manager, Research posting at Decagon was open at OnJob's last check of the employer's careers page, having been published on 4 September 2026. OnJob re-checks source listings on each build and marks a role closed once it disappears, but listings can close without notice, so the employer's own page is the final word.
How do you apply for the Engineering Manager, Research role at Decagon?
Apply to the Engineering Manager, Research at Decagon role through OnJob with a free profile: OnJob scores your fit against the listing, shows the skills lowering that score, and submits an ATS-ready profile to Decagon's own application page. Creating a profile is free and needs no card.
Explore more on OnJob
Hiring for a role like this?
Post a job on OnJob and reach AI-matched candidates.
