Senior Research Engineer, Safety

Decagon
San Francisco, New York
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 200,000 - 400,000 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Experience: 4+ yearsSkills: ["Experimental judgment","Engineering depth","Owning high-stakes problems","Cross-functional collaboration","Risk and tradeoff analysis"]

Build and deploy safety safeguards for conversational AI agents, spanning evaluation through production. Identify real-world failure modes and create adversarial evaluations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by incidents. Develop classifiers, judges, reward signals, and runtime protections to prevent prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, and unsafe or hallucinated outputs. Partner cross-functionally to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices.

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FursaFursa
Decagon
Decagon
1 day ago

Senior Research Engineer, Safety

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 20 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Build and deploy safety safeguards for conversational AI agents, spanning evaluation through production. Identify real-world failure modes and create adversarial evaluations, red-team datasets, and regression suites informed by incidents. Develop classifiers, judges, reward signals, and runtime protections to prevent prompt injection, unsafe tool use, sensitive-data disclosure, and unsafe or hallucinated outputs. Partner cross-functionally to turn enterprise requirements into scalable safeguards and rollout practices.
Location: San Francisco, New York
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)
Seniority: Mid level

Key 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.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 200,000 - 400,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Health InsuranceDentalVisionLife InsuranceDisability401kParental LeaveWellness Stipend

Key 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 to ship production systems.
Experience:4+ yearsAI safetyAI/ML engineeringLanguage modelsAgentic systemsAdversarial testing
Skills:Experimental judgmentEngineering depthOwning high-stakes problemsCross-functional collaborationRisk and tradeoff analysis
Tech Stack:Python

Company Brief

Decagon
Builds conversational AI agents and a platform that automates customer support across chat, email, and voice, enabling brands to deliver concierge-level customer experiences at scale.
Industry: AI & Machine Learning
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series C
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2023
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 3.9
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