
Engineering Lead, Strategic Deals at Decagon (San Francisco, CA)
Decagon· San Francisco, CA· $200k–$400k·
Role details
Decagon at a glance
Autonomous AI agents that resolve enterprise customer support end to end across chat, voice, email, and SMS.
Decagon builds autonomous AI agents for enterprise customer support, handling chat, voice, email, and SMS from one intelligence layer. Its agents resolve requests end to end and take real actions across a company's support stack, with workflows defined in natural language via Agent Operating Procedures so CX teams can iterate without engineering.
$481M+ raised · latest: Series D · $250M · 2026 · backed by Coatue Management, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Accel
Job description
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 Role
Decagon's Strategic Deals are with the largest companies in the world. Each one puts a Decagon agent in front of millions of users, fielding hundreds of millions of conversations a year. These deals are won on technical execution: hard problems without an off-the-shelf answer, latency and reliability constraints at real scale, and requirements that push the product into new territory. You'll own the technical build for 1–3 Strategic Deals end-to-end, operating like the founding CTO of each. You'll work directly with the customer’s senior engineering and product leaders to figure out what they need for the deal to be successful. From there, you decide what Decagon should build, tech-lead a pod of engineers to ship it, and productionize it so it benefits every customer, not just this one. You're across every technical workstream on the deal, from infrastructure and the agent build to model evaluation, research, and the reliability work that makes it production-grade. You sit at the center of product strategy: your decisions shape not only each deployment, but also the feature set that gets reflected in the product itself.
In this role, you will
- Own the technical build end-to-end for a handful of Strategic Deals, from POC through close and into post-close stabilization
- Drive technical requirements directly with the customer’s engineering and product leaders, and build technical champions inside their organizations
- Identify technical risks early and de-risk them before they threaten the deal
- Dig past feature requests to the underlying problem, then scope solutions that generalize, turning bespoke deal requirements into durable improvements to the core Decagon product
- Tech-lead a pod of 1–3 Software Engineers per deal: set technical direction, own delivery, and mentor the engineers on your team
Your background looks something like this
- A strong engineering leader or ex-technical founder with 5+ years of industry experience in software engineering
- Strong appetite for customer-facing work
- Comfort owning high-stakes accounts with significant ambiguity
- The ability to quickly assess how long different technical paths will take, weigh their risks, and choose between them under pressure
- Bonus: experience productionizing agentic systems
Compensation
$200K – $400K + Offers Equity
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)
- 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)
These 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.
Why work at Decagon
- Culture: Described as "Eng-Driven, Ship Fast, Equity, Product Impact" by employees. Values include: "Just get it done," "Invent what customers want," "Winner's mindset," "The Polymath Principle" (cross-functional collaboration) decagon.ai/careers
- Compensation: "We hire the best and treat them accordingly" — competitive compensation philosophy; Glassdoor rating: 3.9/5.0 (257 reviews), Compensation: 5.0/5.0 in Glassdoor-style internal review jobsbyculture.com
- Benefits:
- 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage for dependents
- 401k and FSA/commuter benefits
- Flexible PTO + company-wide winter break shutdown
- Free daily lunches, dinner, and snacks at HQ
- Wellness programs and company events decagon.ai/careers
- Remote/Hybrid/Office: HQ in San Francisco (2261 Market Street); London office (50 York Way). Roles span remote, hybrid, and on-site options based on job postings.
- Engineering culture: 89 technical employees (21% of workforce), Staff/Senior Research Engineer roles for Voice + Speech; "Build, optimize, and scale AI agents" is core identity. Alumni go on to OpenAI, Datadog, Postman, Accel — strong talent pipeline.
- Growth trajectory: 134 open roles; 300+% headcount growth YoY; $4.5B valuation at 3 years old — extremely high-growth environment ideal for career acceleration.
- Notable perk: "We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions" — employees report high product impact and ownership.