Research Engineers, Data

Research Engineer

At Distyl, Research Engineers build the bridge between frontier AI research and production systems that deliver real business value. This role is for engineers who are 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. They design and implement compound AI systems, run experiments to understand system behavior, build evaluation frameworks, and collaborate closely with AI Researchers, AI Engineers, and customer stakeholders. Their work is not limited to demos or isolated prototypes: they help turn new techniques into robust systems that can be measured, operated, and improved in production.

• Design and build data systems that power reliable AI workflows across enterprise environments
• Develop pipelines for collecting, cleaning, transforming, labeling, and evaluating domain-specific data used by AI systems
• Create data quality frameworks that identify coverage gaps, ambiguity, drift, duplication, leakage, and other failure modes
• Build tools and workflows that help teams turn raw customer data into usable context for retrieval, evaluation, reasoning, and execution
• Partner with AI Researchers and AI Engineers to understand how data quality affects system behavior and production outcomes
• Develop synthetic data, annotation, and feedback-loop strategies to improve system performance in areas where real-world data is sparse or noisy
• Analyze customer workflows and datasets to determine what information AI systems need, where that information should come from, and how it should be represented
• Communicate clearly with internal teams and customer stakeholders about data assumptions, limitations, risks, and tradeoffs

• Experience Building Data Systems for AI:
  You have built data pipelines, evaluation datasets, labeling workflows, retrieval corpora, or similar systems that improve model or agent behavior

• Strong Data Engineering Fundamentals:
  You write clean Python and SQL, understand data modeling and pipeline reliability, and can build systems that are maintainable under production constraints

• Research-Oriented Builder:
  You are comfortable investigating how data quality, structure, and representation affect AI system performance

• AI-Native Working Style:
  You use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, debugging, exploration, and workflow automation

• Comfort with Ambiguous Data:
  You can reason through messy enterprise datasets, incomplete documentation, conflicting business definitions, and changing requirements

• Bias Towards Measurement:
  You prefer to make data quality and system behavior observable through concrete metrics, evaluations, and experiments

• Customer Environment Readiness:
  You can work directly with customer teams to understand their data, ask precise questions, and explain tradeoffs clearly

• Ownership Mentality:
  You take responsibility for whether the data layer enables the AI system to deliver reliable value in production

• The base salary range for this role is $150K – $250K, depending on experience, location, and level. In addition to base compensation, this role is eligible for meaningful equity, along with a comprehensive benefits package

• 100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents

• 401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)

• Access to state‑of‑the‑art 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 prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence

Distyl has offices in San Francisco and New York. This role follows a hybrid collaboration model with 3+ days per week (Tuesday–Thursday) in‑office.

#LI-Hybrid

We believe diverse perspectives make our work stronger and more impactful. We are an equal opportunity employer and evaluate all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.