Senior Research Engineer, Safety

The role

You will make AI agents safe, reliable, and controllable from evaluation through production. You will build safeguards, adversarial evaluations, and classifiers to prevent failure modes.

What you will do

• 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

Required 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
• 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

Nice to have

• Experience building safeguards for high-stakes or regulated enterprise workflows
• Familiarity with human-in-the-loop review, incident response, or responsible rollout frameworks for ML systems

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
• Take what you need vacation policy

About the company

Decagon is a conversational AI platform that enables enterprises to deploy AI agents across various channels. The company is an in-office company driven by values like Just Get It Done and The Polymath Principle.