Applied AI Research Engineer - Post-Training (Hybrid, Equity)

Distyl; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

401(k) retirement plan

HSA/FSA

Wellness benefits

In-office lunches

Access to AI models

High-impact projects

Mission-driven culture

Job summary

Distyl AI is hiring a Research Engineer to bridge frontier AI research and production systems. You’ll design post-training workflows, build datasets and evaluation loops, and collaborate with researchers and engineers to deploy robust AI solutions in real customer environments.

You’ll join a team shipping scalable AI at enterprise scale, focusing on measurement-driven improvements, reliability, and cross-functional impact. Hybrid in-office engagement in NY/ SF with strong growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• Experience improving model behavior with fine-tuning, preference optimization, RL, reward modeling, synthetic data or evals
• Strong programming and experimentation skills to build training/evaluation pipelines and run controlled experiments
• Research-oriented mindset focused on understanding why behavior changes beyond just scores
• AI systems mindset: data/prompts/tools/retrieval influence outcomes, not weights alone
• AI-native working style: daily use of AI tools for coding, analysis, debugging, exploration
• Bias towards measurement: prove improvements with evaluations, regression tests, production metrics
• Comfort balancing research with cost, latency, reliability, data availability and customer needs
• Ownership mentality: responsibility for real system outcomes beyond offline metrics

Responsibilities

• Design and run post-training workflows to improve AI behavior, reliability and usefulness
• Develop datasets, signals, evaluation suites, reward models and fine-tuning workflows
• Investigate how post-training techniques affect system behavior across enterprise workflows
• Build infrastructure for experimentation, model comparison, regression testing and behavior analysis
• Collaborate with AI Researchers and AI Engineers to apply techniques in deployed systems
• Analyze model outputs, failures, human feedback and production traces for improvements
• Create repeatable processes to adapt AI systems to customer domains while preserving robustness

Skills

Experience improving model behavior

Programming & experimentation

Research-oriented builder

AI systems mindset

AI-native working style

Measurement-driven

Applied constraints

Ownership mindset

Job description

Distyl AI is hiring a Research Engineer to bridge frontier AI research and production systems. You’ll design post-training workflows, build datasets and evaluation loops, and collaborate with researchers and engineers to deploy robust AI solutions in real customer environments.

You’ll join a team shipping scalable AI at enterprise scale, focusing on measurement-driven improvements, reliability, and cross-functional impact. Hybrid in-office engagement in NY/ SF with strong growth opportunities.