{"id":377858,"url":"https://alion.io/job/decagon-research-engineer-safety","title":"Research Engineer, Safety","company":{"id":48029,"name":"Decagon","domain":"decagon.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/decagon-ai","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":68,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.618,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":400000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":400000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Red Teaming","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-04T23:07:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-04","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T08:39:56Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"About Decagon\nDecagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.\nOur 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.\nWe’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.\nWe’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.\nAbout the Team\nRead more about the research team's work here: https://decagon.ai/blog/introducing-decagon-labs\nThe 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.\nOur 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.\nAbout the Role\nAs a Research Engineer focused on Safety, you’ll be responsible for making Decagon’s AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable, from evaluation through production. You’ll identify real-world failure modes and build the models, evaluations, and safeguards that prevent them.\nWe’re looking for strong engineers who want to advance applied AI safety in production. People here own their work end-to-end, ship real improvements, and are trusted to make high-impact technical decisions.\nIn this role, you will\nResearch and build safeguards against prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, policy violations, and hallucinated commitments\n\nBuild adversarial evaluations, simulations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by production failures\n\nDevelop and deploy classifiers, judges, reward signals, post-training methods, and runtime safeguards for safer agent behavior\n\nAnalyze production traces and incidents to identify root causes, test mitigations, and measure their impact\n\nPartner with Security, Product, Infrastructure, Legal, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices\n\nYour background looks something like this\n2+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, research, or AI safety\n\nHands-on experience evaluating, post-training, or deploying language models or agentic systems\n\nExperience with modern post-training techniques, such as reinforcement learning, preference optimization, distillation, model routing, and synthetic-data generation\n\nExperience with adversarial testing, model red teaming, prompt injection, policy enforcement, privacy, or safe tool use\n\nFluency in Python and modern ML tooling, with strong experimental judgment and the engineering depth to ship production systems\n\nComfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems and making clear risk and product tradeoffs\n\nEven better if you have\nExperience building safeguards for high-stakes or regulated enterprise workflows\n\nFamiliarity with human-in-the-loop review, incident response, or responsible rollout frameworks for ML systems\n\nCompensation\n$200K - $400K + Offers Equity\nThis 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.\nIn addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.\nBenefits\nWe proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:\nMedical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family\n\nLife Insurance and Disability Benefits\n\nRetirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)\n\nParental Leave\n\nFertility and family building benefits through Carrot\n\nMonthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance\n\nDaily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best\n\nTake what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)\n\nThese 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5009,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Life insurance","Parental leave","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Conversational AI","AI Agents","Customer Support & Help Desk Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T21:24:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 32","filings_12m":32,"filings_prev_12m":4,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":262500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":15}],"liveness":{"score":32,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.537,"p_room":0.6,"age_days":51,"expected_fill_days":52,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:late","crowd:junior,brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/decagon-research-engineer-safety","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/decagon-research-engineer-safety.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T11:08:29Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14986,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48029},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48029"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdecagon-research-engineer-safety"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdecagon-research-engineer-safety"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdecagon-research-engineer-safety"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/decagon-research-engineer-safety\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdecagon-research-engineer-safety"}]}