French-Speaking AI Engineer for Production Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity incentives

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement benefits

Wellness benefits

In‑office lunches

Job summary

Distyl AI in New York is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to design, build, and operate production AI systems inside customer environments. You will own system behavior, reliability, and value delivery while collaborating closely with customers and Distyl engineers.

The role requires hands‑on experience with LLM-powered applications, strong Python skills, and the ability to navigate ambiguous problems in enterprise settings. This is a hybrid role with office days in New York.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Fluent in French (Written and Spoken) with the ability to lead technical discussions and collaborate directly with French‑speaking clients.
• Ownership mentality for AI systems. You take responsibility for whether the systems you build deliver their intended value in production.
• Experience building AI systems. You have built applications powered by LLMs or other AI models and are comfortable composing multiple components — prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluators, workflows, and integrations — into end‑to‑end systems.
• Strong engineering fundamentals. You write clean, maintainable Python and are comfortable building production software systems.
• AI‑native working style. You use AI tools daily to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, and automate repetitive work.
• Comfort in customer environments. You are able to work directly with customer teams, ask good questions, and adapt quickly to new domains.
• Pragmatic delivery mindset. You can navigate ambiguity, make progress with incomplete information, and balance speed with robustness when building systems that need to work for production users.
• Willingness to travel. Travel is typically 10-30%, depending on the project, customer needs, and your role on the engagement.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI systems deployed in customer environments, taking ownership of system behavior, reliability, and usefulness in production.
• Design and implement compound AI workflows that combine models, prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluation, feedback loops, and execution into coherent production systems aligned with user and SME needs.
• Develop clean, maintainable Python services and application logic that integrate AI capabilities into customer workflows, data platforms, APIs, and existing applications.
• Operate on live systems by measuring behavior, identifying failure modes, debugging issues, and iterating rapidly to improve quality, reliability, and user value.
• Build evaluation frameworks, test cases, feedback mechanisms, and observability patterns that help teams understand and improve AI system performance over time.
• Work directly with customer stakeholders and subject matter experts to understand workflows, clarify requirements, reason about tradeoffs, and adapt systems as needs evolve.
• Use AI‑native engineering tools to accelerate implementation, debugging, experimentation, data analysis, and system improvement.
• Collaborate with other AI Engineers, AI Strategists, and other Distillers to make pragmatic system design decisions that balance speed, robustness, maintainability, and customer impact.
• Take accountability for the production outcomes of the components, workflows, and systems you build.

Skills

5+ years of software engineering

Fluent in French

Ownership mentality for AI systems

AI systems experience (LLMs)

Strong engineering fundamentals

AI-native working style

Customer-facing communication

Pragmatic delivery mindset

Willingness to travel

Tools

Python

Git

Job description

Distyl AI in New York is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to design, build, and operate production AI systems inside customer environments. You will own system behavior, reliability, and value delivery while collaborating closely with customers and Distyl engineers.

The role requires hands‑on experience with LLM-powered applications, strong Python skills, and the ability to navigate ambiguous problems in enterprise settings. This is a hybrid role with office days in New York.