# Applied AI Researcher, System Self-Improvement 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/f94707a5-3563-49f4-8414-ec3bb8918d03
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/distyl-applied-ai-researcher-system-self-improvement/

## About the role

The System Self-Improvement team builds architectures that continuously evaluate and enhance their own performance. Researchers design feedback-driven systems capable of detecting weaknesses, generating corrective hypotheses, and implementing their own improvements through reflection, retraining, or workflow adaptation. The goal: build AI systems that compound in capability through use.

## 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
- Experience Building Feedback-Driven Systems: You’ve built or studied systems that monitor, score, and adapt—evaluators, retrievers, iterative refinement loops, or performance dashboards that close the feedback loop
- 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
- 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

Tags: Research