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Senior Research Engineer, Safety

Decagon· Engineering
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San Francisco, New York City$200k - $400kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Senior Research Engineer focused on Safety responsible for making Decagon’s AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable from evaluation through production, identifying real-world failure modes and building models, evaluations, and safeguards.

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 turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices

Qualifications

  • 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 the engineering depth to ship production systems
  • Comfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and making clear risk and product tradeoffs

Skills

Required:AI safety engineeringPost-training techniquesAdversarial testing / red teaming

Benefits

  • 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)
Last updated Sep 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Decagon

Conversational AI for Customer Experience

Reimagine your customer experience with AI agents, built for the enterprise.

AI agentsCXConversational AICustomer Experienceai-agents-and-applicationsorchestrationvoice-ai-stackwing-list-2026
Company profileWebsite

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