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