Applied AI Researcher, AI Systems Job at Distyl AI (San Francisco)

Applied AI Researcher, System Discovery

At Distyl we’re pushing the envelope of AI utilization in enterprise. This requi...

Location

United States , San Francisco; New York

Salary:

130000.00 - 250000.00 USD / Year

Distyl AI

Expiration Date

Until further notice

Requirements

Experience building a wide breadth of systems (retrieval pipelines, reasoning agents, evaluation harnesses, multimodal integrations, workflow graph systems)
Experience building with models, not just building models (expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, and associated techniques like ensembling, ReAct, graph-of-thoughts)
Proven track record of research results (published in top journals, posted work online)
Uses AI every day (tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity to accelerate workflow)
Strong programming and data analysis skills
Biases towards showing vs telling

Job Responsibility

Identify entirely new classes of AI systems
Explore a wide range of architectures, modalities, and compositions to uncover how AI can most effectively reshape work
Draw connections across disparate domains to uncover new system archetypes
Experiment with unconventional problem definitions and develop prototypes that reveal new categories of human–AI collaboration

What we offer

100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence
Meaningful equity

Fulltime

Applied AI Researcher, Post-Training

The Post-Training team focuses on adapting foundation models to real-world perfo...

Location

United States , San Francisco; New York

Salary:

130000.00 - 250000.00 USD / Year

Distyl AI

Expiration Date

Until further notice

Requirements

Deep Understanding of Post-training Techniques: Familiarity with supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (RLHF/DPO), LoRA/PEFT, and instruction-tuning pipelines
Experience Adapting Frontier Models: You’ve tuned or adapted LLMs/SLMs to specialized domains or behaviors through data curation, reward modeling, or continual pretraining
Experience Building with Models, Not Just Building Models: We develop intelligent systems using models rather than training or fine-tuning them. Ideal candidates have expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, and associated techniques (ensembling, ReAct, graph-of-thoughts, etc.)
Proven Track Record of Research Results: Whether you’ve published in top journals, posted amazing work on twitter, or somewhere else we want to see what you've done
Uses AI Every Day: Before you can revolutionize someone else’s workflow, you need to revolutionize yours. You should be using tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Perplexity to accelerate your workflow
Strong Programming and Data Analysis Skills: While you might not consider yourself a software engineer you need to be able to build prototypes of your ideas and then perform the experiments to prove the effectiveness to a F500 Head of AI
Biases Towards Showing vs Telling: Our customers want to see the power of AI today vs discuss the most elegant idea that will take 5 years to realize

Job Responsibility

Researchers develop and evaluate techniques such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (DPO, RLHF, RLAIF), and continual adaptation to align models with Distyl’s enterprise systems
Researchers in Post-Training investigate new methods for aligning large models with human and system-level objectives. They explore trade-offs between generalization and specialization, data efficiency and robustness, capability and controllability

What we offer

100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence
meaningful equity

Fulltime

Applied AI Researcher, System Self-Improvement

The System Self-Improvement team builds architectures that continuously evaluate...

Location

United States , San Francisco; New York

Salary:

130000.00 - 250000.00 USD / Year

Distyl AI

Expiration Date

Until further notice

Requirements

Experience Building Feedback-Driven Systems
Experience Building with Models, Not Just Building Models
Proven Track Record of Research Results
Uses AI Every Day
Strong Programming and Data Analysis Skills
Biases Towards Showing vs Telling

Job Responsibility

Design feedback-driven systems capable of detecting weaknesses, generating corrective hypotheses, and implementing their own improvements
Study how systems can form self-models
Explore reflective reasoning, reward modeling, and self-evaluation techniques to enable autonomous evolution

What we offer

100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence
Meaningful equity

Fulltime

Applied AI Researcher, Benchmarking

The Benchmarking team defines how progress is measured. Researchers design evalu...

Location

United States , San Francisco; New York

Salary:

130000.00 - 250000.00 USD / Year

Distyl AI

Expiration Date

Until further notice

Requirements

Experience designing and running evaluations (built or maintained benchmarks, test suites, or experimental frameworks)
Statistical and analytical rigor (design fair, reproducible experiments)
Experience building with models, not just building models (expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, ensembling, ReAct, graph-of-thoughts)
Proven track record of research results (published in top journals or posted work online)
Uses AI every day (tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity)
Strong programming and data analysis skills
Biases towards showing vs telling

Job Responsibility

Design evaluation frameworks that capture reasoning depth, interaction quality, reliability, and operational impact
Construct benchmarks that reflect real-world complexity
Explore new paradigms for evaluating intelligent systems (adversarial robustness testing, longitudinal performance tracking, human-in-the-loop assessment)
Investigate how metrics shape model behavior
Establish rigorous methodologies for quantifying emergent capability

What we offer

100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
401(k) with additional perks (commuter benefits, in-office lunch)
Access to state-of-the-art models
Generous usage of modern AI tools
Ownership of high-impact projects across top enterprises
Meaningful equity

Fulltime

Applied AI Researcher, System Self-Construction

At Distyl we’re pushing the envelope of AI utilization in enterprise. This requi...

Location

United States , San Francisco; New York

Salary:

130000.00 - 250000.00 USD / Year

Distyl AI

Expiration Date

Until further notice

Requirements

Experience building modular and composable systems
Experience building with models, not just building models
Proven track record of research results
Uses AI every day
Strong programming and data analysis skills
Biases towards showing vs telling

Job Responsibility

Design architectures capable of autonomously generating, assembling, and refining sub-systems
Develop meta-learning loops, automated pipeline generation, and self-architecting frameworks
Study recursive design principles: how systems represent their own construction processes, evaluate them, and evolve
Draw from meta-learning, program synthesis, and evolutionary computation

What we offer

100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence
Meaningful equity

Fulltime