AI Production Engineer at Distyl AI

You are a mid-level software engineer with at least three years of experience building and operating high-scale, low-latency systems. You have a solid grasp of

Work type: hybrid

Location: San Francisco | New York

Salary: $150,000 – $250,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

You are a mid-level software engineer with at least three years of experience building and operating high-scale, low-latency systems. You have a solid grasp of backend fundamentals including concurrency and distributed systems, and you prioritize observability and incident response in your development workflow. **What makes it worth a look...** Distyl AI offers a base salary of $150,000 to $250,000 per year plus equity and full healthcare coverage for you and your dependents. This hybrid role requires three days per week in their San Francisco or New York offices while providing access to cutting-edge models and high-impact enterprise projects. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have built and maintained low-latency APIs or streaming data pipelines. * Understand distributed systems concepts like fault tolerance and backpressure. * Maintain an operational mindset focused on logs, metrics, tracing, and alerts. * Actively leverage AI tools to debug performance issues and automate infrastructure tasks.

Job Description

# About Distyl AI

Distyl is an applied AI technology company partnering with the world’s most ambitious institutions to rearchitect critical operations for the frontier of AI. Our customers include the largest companies in telecom, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, consumer goods, and global social organizations.

We research and deploy technologies that power AI-native operations — both for our partners and for Distyl itself. Our work spans research into self-constructing systems, the development of the most reliable execution of AI systems, and products that transform mission-critical workflows. As a result, Distyl's technologies affect some of the world's largest operations — from hundreds of millions of consumer interactions to tens of millions of supply chain transactions and millions of patient journeys.

Distyl is backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, DST Global, and the board-members of 20+ F500s. The results reflect this approach: a 100% production deployment success rate for our customers and one of the few enterprise AI companies to run a profitable business.

# What We Are Looking For

At Distyl, AI systems live or die on latency, reliability, and operational excellence. AI Production Engineersfocus on building and operating AI systems that perform in real time, at scale, under strict reliability constraints. They work with the rest of the forward deployed team to ensure our AI systems are reliable, performant, and secure from the ground up.

These engineers are hands-on system owners who bring deep expertise in production engineering—low-latency services, voice pipelines, batch processing, and observability—while remaining fully accountable for the behavior and value of customer-facing AI systems. They thrive in high-performance environments and take personal ownership of making sure AI systems are fast, stable, and trustworthy in production.

# Key Responsibilities

• Own the performance and reliability characteristics of AI systems deployed in customer environments

• Design, build, and operate low-latency AI services—including real-time voice and interaction pipelines—as well as large-scale batch processing workflows that execute complex AI workloads reliably

• AI Production Engineers are the escalation point for performance and reliability risk, and have veto power on launches that violate production constraints

• Deeply involved in system design, implementation, and operation, investigating performance bottlenecks, failure modes, and scaling limits across AI pipelines, APIs, orchestration layers, and infrastructure

• Design and evolve observability systems—metrics, logs, tracing, alerts—that make AI behavior understandable and actionable in production

• Work directly with Forward Deployed AI Engineers, Product Engineers, and Architects to ensure that production constraints meaningfully shape system design

• Step in on high-risk or high-impact issues, debug live systems, and harden AI services so they can operate continuously under real-world load

• Help turn one-off production solutions into reusable patterns and platform capabilities, raising the overall production bar for Distyl’s AI systems over time

• 3+ years of software engineering experience

• Deep Production Engineering Experience:Built and operated high-scale systems—low-latency APIs, streaming pipelines, real-time services, or large batch processing systems—and can reason deeply about performance, throughput, and reliability. Experience with real-time voice systems is a strong plus

• Strong Systems and Backend Fundamentals:Write high-quality production code and understand distributed systems concepts such as concurrency, fault tolerance, backpressure, and graceful degradation. You are comfortable optimizing systems under tight latency and throughput constraints

• Operational Excellence Mindset:Treat observability, instrumentation, and incident response as first-class concerns. Logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and on-call readiness are integral to how you design and operate systems

• Ownership of AI Systems in Production:Take responsibility for AI systems end-to-end—design, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing health. When something breaks, you care about understanding why, fixing it properly, and preventing recurrence

• AI-Native Working Style:Actively use AI tools to debug systems, analyze performance data, explore designs, and automate operational workflows

• 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, along with a comprehensive benefits package

• 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

We’re grateful for the strong interest in this role. The best way to get your profile in front of our team is to apply directly through our careers page, where all applications are reviewed. Due to the high volume of interest, we’re not able to review or respond to all direct emails or LinkedIn messages. We will be in touch with every applicant once we’ve completed our review, regardless of the decision.

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