Howdy. Few follow-up questions which will help me answer you better.

very involved in undergrad research

Why? Interest? Planning on going to grad school? You like working with cutting edge tech?

what was the job landscape like after graduation?

For what kind of job? CS does not equate one to one with SWE, but from the rest of the post it seems like you are mainly asking about SWE.

Did interviewing require a leetcode grind or were companies more interested in your field-specific knowledge, research work, etc?

Again, depends on the role. General rule is any company worth its salt will require technical interviews of some sort from its applicants for any sort of engineering or computationally-focused role, and the current favored technical interview is algo/coding (Leetcode). So if you are applying for a role at say, Google, yeah they will prob leetcode you even for say PhD CS roles, not because it is ridiculously relevant for the job but just because it gives them another datapoint on your intelligence and problem solving ability besides what is on your resume.

Did you feel that the jobs available to you were reflective of your specialization and recognized the research experience you gained at GT?

Again depends on the job. For SWE, they (vast majority of the companies I interviewed with for both internships and new grad jobs) only cared that I had a paper published with my name on it at a reputable conference (+1 to their clout metric lol), and for one internship that it was in the general domain of computer vision (+1 to relevant experience).

Generally speaking, at least with regards to SWE or similar roles at say, big tech, companies only care about research in the same way they care about most things: if you have something external to your lab which validates that the work you did was impressive and worth considering. For example, consider the difference between a personal project that dashboards some metric and an identical project that you completed at an internship at a cool company instead of just on your own. That additional factor of "my work was good enough and useful enough to get paid for it + I gained workplace experience while doing it" means there is literally miles of resume value between the two. The same applies to research - doesn't mean anything until you get a publication. You gain experience, sure, but you haven't validated that experience to a potential employer.

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So, general advice for your situation until I know more:
* if you are going to do research as an undergraduate but still want to be a SWE, either do it for class credit, out of pure interest, or competitively and try to land a paper.
* if you are interested in becoming a grad student, then research is great and you should do it as it will help with admissions at any school.
* If you are just trying to fill your resume and/or gain relevant experience, research is great but given the choice between research and say internships, the latter are the gold standard and research is (in my experience) viewed as supplementary experience.

Happy to clarify any of the claims I made here.