Ytdyklly

There are several well known classes of groups for which the word problem, conjugacy etc. are solvable in polynomial time (hyperbolic, automatic).

Then there are several classes of groups like asynchronously automatic groups for which it is known that there is an exponential time algorithm to solve the word problem (and whether this can be improved to polynomial is open and conjectured as far as I'm aware).

Going several steps further, there is an algorithm to solve the word problem in one-relator groups in time not bounded by any finite tower of exponentials (and again it is open and conjectured whether this can be improved to P).

On the other, there are algorithms to solve word problems in pathological groups like the Baumslag-Gersten group:

$$G_{(1,2)} = langle a, b | a^{a^b}= a^2 rangle$$

in polynomial time. So even though general algorithms can be very bad, it is unknown whether there are group-specific algorithms for every group in a given class that solve the word problem quickly.

So my question is, are there any groups in which it is known that the word problem (or any other computational problem) is at least exponential, but still solvable? Maybe exp-complete? What are the approaches to proving such a thing?

More or less what Andreas says (in the comments to his answer) is true but one must be careful in the encoding. In

Isoperimetric and Isodiametric Functions of Groups,
Mark V. Sapir, Jean-Camille Birget and Eliyahu Rips
Annals of Mathematics
Second Series, Vol. 156, No. 2 (Sep., 2002), pp. 345-466

and

Mark V. Sapir, Jean-Camille Birget and Eliyahu Rips
Isoperimetric functions of groups and computational complexity of the word problem.
Ann. of Math. (2) 156 (2002), no. 2, 467–518.

groups with NP complete word problem are constructed and other similar results. See in particular, Corollary 1.1 of the first paper listed above.

There are finitely presented groups whose word problem is undecidable. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_for_groups .

An earlier reference for groups with this property is

J. Avenhaus and K. Madlener. Subrekursive Komplexität der Gruppen. I. Gruppen mit vorgeschriebenen Komplexität. Acta Infomat., 9 (1): 87-104, 1977/78.

There is a hierarchy of the recursive functions known as the (difficult to pronounce) Grzegorczyk Hierarchy $E_0 subset E_1 subset E_2 subset cdots$, where (roughly) $E_1$ contains the linearly bounded functions, $E_2$ polynomially bounded functions, and $E_3$ those functions that are bounded by iterated exponentials.

The above paper describes constructions of finitely presented groups $G_n$ for $n ge 3$, in which solving the word problem has time complexity bounded by a function $E_n$ but not by any function in $E_{n-1}$,

Classical problem which is believed not to be in P is number factoring, which can be cast as computing a decomposition of a cyclic group into simple ones.

Several problems in permutation groups are known to be as hard as graph isomorphism, thus not believed to be in P, too.

There are also NP-hard problems known for permutation groups, see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X09001289