Applied Artificial Intelligence Researcher (System Discovery)

• Our researchers come from many academic backgrounds but have strong research track records, operate in an AI-native way, and would be bored staying on the rails of a traditional research org
• Analogous to hypothesis generation in the space of AI for scientific discovery, the System Discovery team focuses on identifying entirely new classes of AI systems. Researchers explore a wide range of architectures, modalities, and compositions to uncover how AI can most effectively reshape work
• Draw connections across disparate domains to uncover new system archetypes. Experiment with unconventional problem definitions and develop prototypes that reveal new categories of human–AI collaboration

Benefits

• Equity options and healthcare
• Collaborative and supportive work environment
• Strong focus on personal and professional growth- At Distyl we’re pushing the envelope of AI utilization in enterprise. This requires 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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 else’s workflow, you need to revolutionize yours. You should be using tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Perplexity to accelerate your workflow