Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI systems deployed in customer environments, taking ownership of system behavior, reliability, and usefulness in production
• Design and implement compound AI workflows that combine models, prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluation, feedback loops, and execution into coherent production systems aligned with user and SME needs
• Develop clean, maintainable Python services and application logic that integrate AI capabilities into customer workflows, data platforms, APIs, and existing applications
• Operate on live systems by measuring behavior, identifying failure modes, debugging issues, and iterating rapidly to improve quality, reliability, and user value
• Build evaluation frameworks, test cases, feedback mechanisms, and observability patterns that help teams understand and improve AI system performance over time
• Work directly with customer stakeholders and subject matter experts to understand workflows, clarify requirements, reason about tradeoffs, and adapt systems as needs evolve
• Use AI-native engineering tools to accelerate implementation, debugging, experimentation, data analysis, and system improvement
• Collaborate with other AI Engineers, AI Strategists, and other Distillers to make pragmatic system design decisions that balance speed, robustness, maintainability, and customer impact
• Take accountability for the production outcomes of the components, workflows, and systems you build
• What We Require
• 2+ years of software engineering experience
• Ownership mentality for AI systems. You take responsibility for whether the systems you build deliver their intended value in production. You are comfortable making technical decisions, learning from system behavior, and owning the results of your work
• Strong engineering fundamentals. You write clean, maintainable Python and are comfortable building production software systems. You understand core engineering concepts like versioning, debugging, testing, performance, code review, and production readiness
• AI-native working style. You use AI tools daily to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, and automate repetitive work. You are curious about new model capabilities and techniques, and actively incorporate them into how you build and iterate on systems
• Comfort in customer environments. You are able to work directly with customer teams, ask good questions, and adapt quickly to new domains. You communicate clearly about system behavior, limitations, and tradeoffs, and can operate

Requirements

• This is not a demo-building role. Forward Deployed AI Engineers are expected to make AI systems work in practice: with users, data, constraints, and accountability for production outcomes.

Benefits

Additional Information

About Distyl AI Distyl is an applied AI technology company partnering with the world's most ambitious institutions to rearchitect critical operations for the frontier of AI. Our customers include the largest companies in telecom, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, consumer goods, and global social organizations. We research and deploy technologies that power AI-native operations - both for our partners and for Distyl itself. Our work spans research into self-constructing systems, the development of the most reliable execution of AI systems, and products that transform mission-critical workflows. As a result, Distyl's technologies affect some of the world's largest operations - from hundreds of millions of consumer interactions to tens of millions of supply chain transactions and millions of patient journeys. Distyl is backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, DST Global, and the board-members of 20+ F500s. The results reflect this approach: a 100% production deployment success rate for our customers and one of the few enterprise AI companies to run a profitable business.

Your Match

How well this role fits your profile.

Company Intel

What employees say

Worked at distyl? Share your experience