Applied AI Researcher, System Self-Improvement

Distyl AI seeks an Applied AI Researcher on its System Self-Improvement team to develop enterprise AI systems that evaluate and enhance their own performance. The team aims to build systems whose capabilities improve through use, supporting AI-native operations and mission-critical workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design feedback-driven architectures that detect weaknesses, generate corrective hypotheses, and improve through reflection, retraining, or workflow adaptation.
• Research how systems form self-models and understand when, why, and how they succeed or fail. Explore reflective reasoning, reward modeling, and self-evaluation, drawing on reinforcement learning, interpretability, and meta-optimization.
• Build prototypes and run experiments that demonstrate effectiveness to enterprise customers.

Qualifications and approach:

• Experience building or studying systems that monitor, score, and adapt, such as evaluators, retrievers, iterative refinement loops, or performance dashboards.
• A demonstrated record of research results, strong programming and data analysis skills, and the ability to turn ideas into working demonstrations.
• Regular use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Cursor, and Perplexity to accelerate work. The role emphasizes practical results rather than incremental benchmark improvements.
• Ideal candidates have expertise in building systems with models, including compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, ensembling, ReAct, or graph-of-thoughts. The work focuses on using models rather than primarily training or fine-tuning them. No specific degree or number of years of experience is stated.

Location and compensation:

The role is based in San Francisco or New York and follows a hybrid schedule with 3+ in-office days per week, including Tuesday–Thursday. Base salary is $150K–$250K, depending on experience, location, and level. The role is also eligible for equity and benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, flexible time off, retirement and financial-planning resources, and wellness and family-building benefits.