AI Engineer, Lead

Distyl AI seeks a hands-on engineering lead to own the architecture, execution, and delivery of production AI systems for large enterprise customers. The role combines technical leadership, direct customer collaboration, and accountability for business outcomes as systems operate under real-world constraints.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor AI Engineers, setting technical direction, code-quality standards, and execution practices while supporting individual growth.
• Design and implement production-ready systems combining models, agents, retrieval, evaluation, and execution.
• Work with customer stakeholders and Distyl’s AI strategy team to explain system behavior, tradeoffs, limitations, and improvements.
• Measure and improve live-system quality, reliability, and usefulness; identify failure modes, debug issues, and adapt to changing requirements.
• Integrate systems with customer data platforms, APIs, and applications, balancing delivery speed, robustness, maintainability, and long-term operability.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including technical or engineering leadership on customer-facing or production AI projects. People-management experience is not required, but experience guiding engineers through decisions, execution, mentorship, and delivery is expected.
• Strong solutions-architecture fundamentals across cloud systems, integrations, API design, and data engineering. Ability to make independent decisions about system design, evaluation, integration, and iteration, and to work with customer architecture and engineering teams.
• Daily use of AI tools for coding, debugging, design exploration, data analysis, and automation; willingness to adopt new model capabilities and techniques. Travel is typically 10–30%, depending on the engagement.

Arrangement and compensation:

• Hybrid in San Francisco or New York, with 3+ in-office days per week (Tuesday–Thursday).
• Base salary of $200–$250K, depending on experience, location, and level, plus equity and benefits including employee and dependent medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible time off, retirement and financial-planning resources, and wellness support.