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Decagon

Staff Software Engineer, Agent Platform

Hybrid

Part remote, part office, you need to live within commuting distance of a named location.

Hybrid · San Francisco

Employer listed it 10 months ago · Added 4 days ago

Been open since 10 months ago. Long-running listings are sometimes left up after the role is filled.

Salary

$200,000–$400,000

Location

Hybrid · San Francisco

Timezone

Not stated

Contract

Full-time

Experience

Lead

Category

Software

Published by the employer

Remote flexibility

Hybrid

This role is only partly remote, the employer expects time in the office around San Francisco, Hybrid, so you need to live within commuting distance.

What the employer says

  • Source listing states candidate location: "San Francisco, Hybrid"
  • Listing mentions "Hybrid"

What Nomaders makes of it

  • Not suitable if you plan to move between countries

The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.

About the role

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

The Agent Platform team builds the runtime and model orchestration layer that powers Decagon’s agents in production. This is the orchestration layer that turns workflows, tools and guardrails into a reliable, low-latency, and delightful experience for end users.

At the core of this work is the agent harness: the routing, execution logic, tool orchestration, and control-plane systems that determine how an agent behaves in a live conversation. The team owns the full execution lifecycle of each conversation—from selecting workflows and orchestrating multiple models (e.g., router/planner/supervisor patterns), to coordinating tool calls, enforcing safety constraints, and communicating back to the user.

The team operates across both real-time systems (e.g., voice interactions with strict latency requirements) and longer-horizon execution (supporting more complex reasoning and workflows). Our research shows that an agent’s task execution reliability increasingly depends on the orchestration layer that wraps around it.

This is highly experimental, frontier-style engineering. The team continuously analyzes real-world failures, builds feedback loops through offline evaluation and online experimentation, and iterates quickly to improve quality, reliability, and capability. As model capabilities evolve, the team regularly rethinks system design to push agent performance forward in production.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Agent Platform team, you will design and build the systems that govern how Decagon agents operate in real-world environments.

You will own complex, distributed systems that sit at the heart of the agent runtime: execution frameworks, model orchestration logic, and experimentation platforms that ensure agents are fast, reliable, and continuously improving. Your work will directly impact how agents reason, take actions, and deliver outcomes across millions of interactions.

This role operates in a fast-moving, ambiguous space with tight feedback loops. You’ll move fluidly between diagnosing production issues, designing new system abstractions, and running experiments to improve agent behavior. You’ll collaborate closely with Research, Infra, and Product teams to ship improvements safely and at scale.

In this role, you will

Design and evolve agent harnesses that power different product experiences

Build core runtime systems, including AOP execution and multi-model orchestration

Develop control-plane logic for routing, planning, and tool invocation with strong safety guarantees

Optimize agent systems for latency, reliability, and production correctness

Analyze real-world failures and use data to drive iterative improvements

Build and operate online experimentation (A/B testing) and contribute to offline evaluation frameworks

Improve observability, testing, and simulation systems to ensure safe, measurable progress

Contribute to voice and real-time systems (e.g., transcription pipelines, turn-taking, latency improvements)

Continuously adapt orchestration systems as model capabilities evolve

Requirements

The employer hasn't listed requirements separately, they're described in the role summary above and on the original listing.

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)
  • ·Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

How to apply

  1. 1Check the flexibility label above, hybrid, matches where you plan to live and work.
  2. 2Tailor your CV to the role at Decagon, mentioning your remote working experience.
  3. 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.

Found 5d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.

Listing sourced from Company boards.

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