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Applied AI Researcher, System Self-Improvement

Distyl AI· Research
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Hybrid (San Francisco), Hybrid (New York)$150k - $250kFull-timePosted 11mo ago

About the role

Researcher role focused on building feedback-driven, self-improving AI systems that continuously evaluate and enhance their own performance, combining reinforcement learning, interpretability, and meta-optimization to create enterprise AI that compounds in capability.

Responsibilities

  • The System Self-Improvement team builds architectures that continuously evaluate and enhance their own performance. Researchers design feedback-driven systems capable of detecting weaknesses, generating corrective hypotheses, and implementing their own improvements through reflection, retraining, or workflow adaptation. The goal: build AI systems that compound in capability through use.
  • Researchers in Self-Improvement study how systems can form self-models—understanding when, why, and how they succeed or fail. They explore reflective reasoning, reward modeling, and self-evaluation techniques to enable autonomous evolution. This work bridges reinforcement learning, interpretability, and meta-optimization to pioneer continuously learning enterprise systems.

Qualifications

  • Experience Building Feedback-Driven Systems: You’ve built or studied systems that monitor, score, and adapt—evaluators, retrievers, iterative refinement loops, or performance dashboards that close the feedback loop.
  • 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: You should be using tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Perplexity to accelerate your workflow.
  • Strong Programming and Data Analysis Skills: you need to build prototypes of your ideas and then perform experiments to prove effectiveness to a Fortune 500 Head of AI.
  • Biases Towards Showing vs Telling: Customers want to see the power of AI today.

Skills

Required:Feedback-driven system designCompound AI systems & agentic techniquesResearch & disseminationPractical AI tooling

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
  • A mission-driven, fast-moving culture that values curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence
Last updated Aug 12, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Distyl AI

Rearchitecting Entire Industries For Frontier Technologies

Building AI solutions that power F500 big bets and create a competitive edge.

AIIndustry transformationEnterprise AIInnovation
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