Research Engineers, Agents
$150k - $250k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 3mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Agent Engineer
About the job
Distyl AI is seeking Research Engineers to build the bridge between frontier AI research and production systems that deliver real business value. This role is for engineers excited to investigate how AI systems should be designed, rapidly prototype new ideas, and turn promising concepts into reliable systems that work inside real customer environments. Research Engineers operate at the intersection of applied research, systems engineering, and customer-facing deployment, designing and implementing compound AI systems, running experiments, building evaluation frameworks, and collaborating closely with AI Researchers, AI Engineers, and customer stakeholders. Their work involves turning new techniques into robust systems that can be measured, operated, and improved in production.
Responsibilities
- Design, prototype, and implement agentic AI systems for complex enterprise workflows.
- Build compound AI architectures incorporating planning, tool use, retrieval, memory, evaluation, orchestration, and execution.
- Investigate agent reasoning, coordination, error recovery, and interaction with external systems under real-world constraints.
- Develop evaluation frameworks to measure agent behavior, task completion, reliability, robustness, and failure modes.
- Create tools and abstractions to simplify observation, debugging, testing, and improvement of agent behavior.
- Collaborate with AI Researchers on new agent architectures and AI Engineers to productionize successful approaches.
- Integrate agents into customer APIs, applications, data platforms, and operational workflows.
- Communicate agent capabilities, limitations, tradeoffs, and risks to internal teams and customer stakeholders.
Requirements
- Experience building AI systems using models, tools, retrieval, planning, memory, or multi-step execution for real tasks.
- Strong engineering fundamentals with clean, maintainable Python and experience debugging complex, stateful systems.
- Systems-level reasoning about the interaction of prompts, tools, context, evaluators, state, orchestration, and external APIs.
- Research-oriented approach with curiosity about agent success/failure and ability to design experiments.
- AI-native working style, utilizing AI tools daily for coding, debugging, design exploration, and experimentation.
- Bias towards demonstrating functionality through working examples, traces, evaluations, and production behavior.
- Comfort in customer environments, translating ambiguous business workflows into concrete agent designs and explaining system behavior.
- Ownership mentality for the reliable, safe, and useful performance of agentic systems in production.
Benefits
- Base salary range of $150K – $250K.
- Meaningful equity.
- Comprehensive benefits package.
- 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents.
- Flexible time off.
- Retirement and financial planning benefits (HSA, FSA, commuter accounts, 401(k), financial coaching).
- Comprehensive wellness benefits (physical fitness, mental well-being, fertility and family-building).
- Complimentary in-office lunches and snacks.
- Access to state-of-the-art AI models and generous usage of modern AI tools.
- Ownership of high-impact projects across top enterprises.