Research Engineers, Post-Training

About the role

At Distyl, Research Engineers build the bridge between frontier AI research and production systems that deliver real business value. This role is for engineers who are excited to investigate how AI systems should be designed, rapidly prototype new ideas, and turn promising concepts into reliable systems that work inside real customer environments. Research Engineers operate at the intersection of applied research, systems engineering, and customer-facing deployment. They design and implement compound AI systems, run experiments to understand system behavior, build evaluation frameworks, and collaborate closely with AI Researchers, AI Engineers, and customer stakeholders. Their work is not limited to demos or isolated prototypes: they help turn new techniques into robust systems that can be measured, operated, and improved in production.

Responsibilities

• Design and run post-training workflows that improve the 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 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

Requirements

• Experience improving model behavior: fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, synthetic data, evals, or related post-training techniques
• Strong programming and experimentation skills: build training and evaluation pipelines, run controlled experiments, analyze results, iterate quickly
• Research‑oriented builder: care about understanding why behavior changes, not just whether a benchmark improves
• AI systems mindset: understand that model behavior is shaped by data, prompts, tools, retrieval, evaluators, and deployment context—not model weights alone
• AI‑native working style: use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, debugging, experimentation, and research exploration
• Bias towards measurement: make behavioral improvements concrete through evaluations, comparisons, regression tests, and production‑relevant metrics
• Comfort with applied constraints: balance research ambition with practical constraints around cost, latency, reliability, data availability, and customer requirements
• Ownership mentality: take responsibility for whether post‑training work improves real system outcomes, not just offline scores

Benefits

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible time off
• Retirement and financial planning benefits, including access to pre‑tax HSA, FSA, and commuter accounts, 401(k), and financial coaching resources
• Comprehensive wellness benefits, including physical fitness, mental well‑being, and fertility and family‑building benefits through Carrot
• Complimentary in‑office lunches and snacks
• Access to state‑of‑the‑art AI models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
• Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
• Mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that values curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $150K – $250K, depending on experience, location, and level. In addition to base compensation, this role is eligible for meaningful equity.

Schedule

Distyl has offices in San Francisco and New York. This role follows a hybrid collaboration model with 3+ days per week (Tuesday–Thursday) in‑office.