Applied AI Researcher, AI Systems at Distyl AI

You’re a researcher with a proven track record who prefers building compound AI systems over training models from scratch. You should have strong programming sk

Work type: hybrid

Location: San Francisco | New York

Salary: $150,000 – $250,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

You’re a researcher with a proven track record who prefers building compound AI systems over training models from scratch. You should have strong programming skills to prototype and validate your work for enterprise stakeholders. **What makes it worth a look...** Distyl AI offers a base salary of $150,000 to $250,000 plus equity for this hybrid role in San Francisco or New York. The position includes 100% employer-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for both you and your dependents. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have hands-on experience with agentic collaboration and techniques like ReAct, ensembling, or graph-of-thoughts. * Use AI tools like Cursor, ChatGPT, or Perplexity daily to accelerate your own research workflow. * Possess the ability to build functional prototypes to prove system effectiveness. * Focus on end-to-end architecture design for LLMs, retrievers, and memory systems.

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 we’re pushing the envelope of AI utilization in enterprise. This requires creative researchers who don’t just want to drive incremental improvements on benchmarks or optimize an existing process but instead are looking to creatively redefine how software is used.

Our researchers come from many academic backgrounds but have strong research track records, operate in an AI-native way, and would be bored staying on the rails of a traditional research org.

# Key Responsibilities

• The AI Systems team focuses on designing compound, end-to-end architectures that orchestrate perception, reasoning, planning, and execution. Researchers integrate diverse components (LLMs, retrievers, evaluators, memory systems, and execution agents) into robust, scalable systems that perform reliably across dynamic enterprise workflows.

• Researchers in AI Systems investigate the governing principles behind complex system interactions. They study coordination, information flow, and emergent behavior across multiple agents and models. Their work identifies the underlying mechanics of robustness, composability, and alignment, in effect establishing the design language for how intelligent systems should be built.

• Experience Building with Models, Not Just Building Models: We develop intelligent systems using models rather than training or fine-tuning them. Ideal candidates have expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, and associated techniques (ensembling, ReAct, graph-of-thoughts, etc.).

• Proven Track Record of Research Results: Whether you’ve published in top journals, posted amazing work on twitter, or somewhere else we want to see what you've done.

• Uses AI Every Day: Before you can revolutionize someone else’s workflow, you need to revolutionize yours. You should be using tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Perplexity to accelerate your workflow.

• Strong Programming and Data Analysis Skills: While you might not consider yourself a software engineer you need to be able to build prototypes of your ideas and then perform the experiments to prove the effectiveness to a F500 Head of AI.

• Biases Towards Showing vs Telling: Our customers want to see the power of AI today vs discuss the most elegant idea that will take 5 years to realize.

• 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

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