Applied AI Post-Training Engineer

Distyl; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Insurance coverage

Flexible time off

401(k) plan

HSA/FSA

Lunches provided

Hybrid work model

Wellness benefits

Job summary

Distyl AI in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer to bridge frontier AI research and production systems. You will design and implement compound AI systems, run experiments, and collaborate with Researchers and Engineers to deploy robust solutions for customers.

The role emphasizes hands-on prototyping, measurement-focused development, and contributing to mission-critical workflows. Hybrid work with in-office days supports collaboration and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• Experience with post-training techniques such as fine-tuning, reward modeling, or RL.
• Ability to build training/evaluation pipelines and run controlled experiments.
• Curiosity about why behavior changes and how data/context affects outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Design and run post-training workflows that improve behavior, reliability, and usefulness of AI systems.
• Develop datasets, preference signals, evaluation suites, reward models, fine-tuning workflows, and feedback loops for applied AI use cases.
• Investigate how post-training techniques affect system behavior across enterprise workflows and production constraints.
• Build infrastructure for experimentation, model comparison, regression testing, and behavior analysis.
• Partner with AI Researchers to explore new post-training methods and with AI Engineers to apply successful techniques in deployed systems.
• Analyze model outputs, failure modes, human feedback, and production traces to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Create repeatable processes for adapting AI systems to customer domains while preserving robustness and transparency.

Skills

Fine-tuning

Reinforcement learning

Experimentation

Python

Evaluation pipelines

Job description

Distyl AI in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer to bridge frontier AI research and production systems. You will design and implement compound AI systems, run experiments, and collaborate with Researchers and Engineers to deploy robust solutions for customers.

The role emphasizes hands-on prototyping, measurement-focused development, and contributing to mission-critical workflows. Hybrid work with in-office days supports collaboration and rapid iteration.