← All roles

Research Engineers, Post-Training

Distyl AI· Research
Apply on company site
Hybrid (San Francisco), Hybrid (New York)$150k - $250kFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Research Engineers bridge frontier AI research and production systems, designing and implementing post-training workflows, evaluation frameworks, and infrastructure to improve AI system behavior in enterprise environments.

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

Qualifications

  • Experience Improving Model Behavior: You have worked with fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, synthetic data, evals, or related post-training techniques
  • Strong Programming and Experimentation Skills: You can build training and evaluation pipelines, run controlled experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly
  • Research-Oriented Builder: You care about understanding why behavior changes, not just whether a benchmark improves
  • AI Systems Mindset: You understand that model behavior is shaped by data, prompts, tools, retrieval, evaluators, and deployment context—not model weights alone
  • AI-Native Working Style: You use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, debugging, experimentation, and research exploration
  • Bias Towards Measurement: You make behavioral improvements concrete through evaluations, comparisons, regression tests, and production-relevant metrics
  • Comfort with Applied Constraints: You can balance research ambition with practical constraints around cost, latency, reliability, data availability, and customer requirements
  • Ownership Mentality: You take responsibility for whether post-training work improves real system outcomes, not just offline scores

Skills

Required:Post-training techniques (finetuning, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, synthetic data, evals)Experimentation and pipeline developmentSystem design for AI deploymentsCommunication with stakeholders

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 provided
  • 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 Sep 3, 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
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Distyl AI