Lead AI Engineer - New York

Distyl AI develops AI native technologies for humans & AI to collaborate to power the operations of the Global Fortune 1000.

In just 24 months, we’ve rapidly grown to partner with some of the world’s largest enterprises—including F100 telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, and retail companies—delivering multiple AI deployments with $100M+ impact. Our platform, Distillery, along with our team of AI Engineers, Researchers, and Strategists, is pioneering AI-native systems of work, solving the most complex, high-stakes challenges at scale.

Distyl is founded and led by proven leaders from companies like Palantir, Apple, and top national laboratories. We work in deep partnership with OpenAI, jointly going-to-market at the largest enterprises and collaborating evaluating and testing the latest models. Backed by Lightspeed, Khosla, Coatue, industry leaders like Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), as well as board members of over 20+ F500s, Distyl is building the future of AI-powered enterprise operations.

What We Are Looking For:

At Distyl we're deploying production LLM systems for our F500 clients largest workflows. This requires exceptional engineers who are going to push the boundaries of what is possible with LLM solutions.

Lead AI Engineers at Distyl operate as the CTO of an engagement with a F500 customer, taking ownership of the project’s technical direction. They have a vision for the future and aren’t afraid to pitch bold ideas to F500 Enterprise Architects. From there, they lead a team of engineers to fundamentally transform how their customer operates. Always looking to grow, they’re driven by a passion for mastering their craft and excited to take on leadership roles that shape the future of AI.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Develop Production Grade AI Systems: For many of our customers we are their only successful GenAI project (and not for the lack of trying). This is because our AI Engineers are experts at understanding how to use software to tame the complexity of AI. They understand power and limits of both AI and Software and build systems which bring the best of both.

2. Own End to End Delivery of Custom AI Solutions: Lead AI Engineers are responsible for architecting the solution, partnering with customer engineers to deploy into the customer’s environment, and then ensure the system operates as intended.

3. Earn Our Customer's Trust: AI's power has yet to be fully realized, but there are already a lot of broken promises. All Distillers are customer facing and our engineers are responsible for making sure our promises are kept. You will partner with our AI strategists and researchers to devise a solution, present it customer enterprise architects, and then educate them on how our system works.

Qualifications:

• Exceptional Software Engineering Skills: AI’s rapid evolution means code written today might not be useful tomorrow. We need engineers who know how to design and write stable, maintainable, and secure systems that are able to evolve. We use Python but are open to strong experience in other languages.

• Experience with AI Systems: You should know how to build a RAG system, done prompt engineering, and know the difference between precision and recall. While you'll partner with our Research Team to design these systems, you must be able to do the work to drive a POC to a production grade AI tool.

• Strong Communication and Organizational Ability: As the project technical lead, you will own relationships with customer technical teams, develop a plan with Distyl’s Project Leads, and work with the rest of the engineering team to deliver.

• Understanding of Enterprise Cloud Architectures: Our systems are deployed into our customer's environments, often into complex hybrid cloud environments. Our business is won on our Lead AI Engineer’s abillity to be trusted by customer enterprise architecture teams.

• 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.

What We Offer:

• An opportunity to advance the cutting-edge of LLM research and directly revolutionize work in the enterprise space.

• Ownership of high-impact research projects, with the autonomy to explore novel approaches and solutions.

• Access to state-of-the-art AI models, real business problems, and proprietary data sets across a diverse range of real-world industries.

• Competitive salary and benefits package, including equity options and healthcare.

• Be part of a mission-oriented company to create practical adoption during the biggest revolution in human productivity.

• A collaborative and intellectually stimulating environment that encourages innovation and personal growth.

If you are an innovative, ambitious, and driven individual looking to make a difference in the world of AI, we want to hear from you. Apply now to join our team as an Lead AI engineer and help us shape the future of AI-driven solutions for enterprises across the globe.

Note: Distyl is a hybrid working environment and requires in office collaboration 3 days a week. We have offices in SF and NYC