Jobs · Engineering · California

Research Engineers, Post-Training

Distyl · San Francisco, CA · 1 wk ago
HybridEngineering$150k–$250k/yrFull-time

Key Responsibilities

  • Design and run post-training workflows that improve the behavior, reliability, and usefulness of AI systems
  • Create datasets, preference signals, evaluation suites, reward models, fine-tuning workflows, and feedback loops for applied AI use cases
  • Investigate how different 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 behavioral improvement
  • Create repeatable processes for adapting AI systems to customer domains while preserving robustness, transparency, and maintainability
  • Communicate clearly with internal teams and customer stakeholders about model behavior, evaluation results, limitations, and tradeoffs

Who You Are

  • Experience Improving Model Behavior: You have worked with fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, synthetic data, evals, or related post-training techniques
  • Strong Programming and Experimentation Skills: You can build training and evaluation pipelines, run controlled experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly
  • Research-Oriented Builder: You care about understanding why behavior changes, not just whether a benchmark improves
  • AI Systems Mindset: You understand that model behavior is shaped by data, prompts, tools, retrieval, evaluators, and deployment context—not model weights alone
  • AI-Native Working Style: You use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, debugging, experimentation, and research exploration
  • Bias Towards Measurement: You make behavioral improvements concrete through evaluations, comparisons, regression tests, and production-relevant metrics
  • Comfort with Applied Constraints: You can balance research ambition with practical constraints around cost, latency, reliability, data availability, and customer requirements
  • Ownership Mentality: You take responsibility for whether post-training work improves real system outcomes, not just offline scores

What We Offer

  • The base salary range for this role is $150K – $250K, depending on experience, location, and level
  • 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

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