# Applied AI Researcher, Post-Training at Distyl

- Company: Distyl
- What the company does: Architecting the AI-Native Enterprise. Distyl partners with the most ambitious enterprises to design and operationalize their AI transformations. Backed by Khosla, Lightspeed and Peak XV.
- Company website: https://distyl.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $150K to $250K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2025-10-16
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/distyl/4d08070a-2a80-4eaa-b702-04d80dc2ac59
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/distyl-applied-ai-researcher-post-training/

## About the role

The Post-Training team focuses on adapting foundation models to real-world performance and alignment requirements. Researchers develop and evaluate techniques such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (DPO, RLHF, RLAIF), and continual adaptation to align models with Distyl’s enterprise systems. The goal is to bridge raw model capability with trustworthy, contextually aligned system behavior

## What they're looking for

- 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
- Deep Understanding of Post-training Techniques: Familiarity with supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (RLHF/DPO), LoRA/PEFT, and instruction-tuning pipelines
- Experience Adapting Frontier Models: You’ve tuned or adapted LLMs/SLMs to specialized domains or behaviors through data curation, reward modeling, or continual pretraining
- 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
- 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

Tags: Research