Applied AI Researcher, Post-Training at Distyl AI

You are a research-focused AI professional with a strong track record of adapting LLMs to enterprise environments through fine-tuning and compound system design

Work type: hybrid

Location: San Francisco | New York

Salary: $150,000 – $250,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

You are a research-focused AI professional with a strong track record of adapting LLMs to enterprise environments through fine-tuning and compound system design. You need a deep, practical understanding of instruction-tuning pipelines and agentic workflows to succeed in this role. **What makes it worth a look...** Distyl AI offers a base salary of $150,000 to $250,000 per year plus equity and full medical coverage for families. You will work in a hybrid capacity from either their San Francisco or New York offices with a requirement of three days per week on-site. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Possess hands-on experience with DPO, RLHF, or LoRA techniques. * Can demonstrate a history of successful research results via publications or public project work. * Build agentic systems using tools like ReAct or graph-of-thoughts. * Use AI tools like Cursor and Perplexity daily to accelerate your own output.

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 Post-Training team focuses on adapting foundation models to real-world performance and alignment requirements. Researchers develop and evaluate techniques such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (DPO, RLHF, RLAIF), and continual adaptation to align models with Distyl’s enterprise systems. The goal is to bridge raw model capability with trustworthy, contextually aligned system behavior

• Researchers in Post-Training investigate new methods for aligning large models with human and system-level objectives. They explore trade-offs between generalization and specialization, data efficiency and robustness, capability and controllability. Their work informs how Distyl leverages foundation models safely, effectively, and at scale across industries

• Deep Understanding of Post-training Techniques: Familiarity with supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (RLHF/DPO), LoRA/PEFT, and instruction-tuning pipelines.

• Experience Adapting Frontier Models: You’ve tuned or adapted LLMs/SLMs to specialized domains or behaviors through data curation, reward modeling, or continual pretraining.

• 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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