Applied AI Researcher at Distyl AI

Setup: Hybrid
Location: San Francisco, California
Type: Full-time
Posted: Oct 16, 2025

Description

Distyl AI is seeking an Applied AI Researcher to join their System Discovery team. This role involves identifying new classes of AI systems, exploring various architectures and modalities, and developing prototypes for human-AI collaboration. The ideal candidate will have experience building a wide breadth of systems, expertise in compound AI systems, a proven track record of research results, and strong programming and data analysis skills. The position offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including 100% covered medical, dental, and vision insurance, and the opportunity to work in a hybrid environment in San Francisco or New York City.

Required Skills

AI Systems
Retrieval Pipelines
Reasoning Agents
Evaluation Harnesses
Multimodal Integrations
Workflow Graph Systems
Compound AI Systems
Agentic Collaboration
Ensembling
ReAct
Graph-of-Thoughts
Programming
Data Analysis
Prototyping
Experimentation
LLM Research
Hypothesis Generation

Additional Information

Preferred Qualifications: Experience Building a Wide Breadth of Systems: You’ve built across many paradigms—retrieval pipelines, reasoning agents, evaluation harnesses, multimodal integrations, or workflow graph systems—and can abstract what makes each effective.
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’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.
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.
operate in an AI-native way, and would be bored staying on the rails of a traditional research org.