Research Engineers, Data

$150K - $250K New York, NY, US Mid Level Research Engineer

Interested in this Research Engineer role at Distyl AI?

Apply Now →

Skills & Technologies

Drift AiPython

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

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.

What We Are Looking For

===========================

At Distyl, Research Engineers build the bridge between frontier AI research and production systems that deliver real business value. This role is for engineers who are excited to investigate how AI systems should be designed, rapidly prototype new ideas, and turn promising concepts into reliable systems that work inside real customer environments.

Research Engineers operate at the intersection of applied research, systems engineering, and customer\-facing deployment. They design and implement compound AI systems, run experiments to understand system behavior, build evaluation frameworks, and collaborate closely with AI Researchers, AI Engineers, and customer stakeholders. Their work is not limited to demos or isolated prototypes: they help turn new techniques into robust systems that can be measured, operated, and improved in production.

Key Responsibilities

========================

  • Design and build data systems that power reliable AI workflows across enterprise environments
  • Develop pipelines for collecting, cleaning, transforming, labeling, and evaluating domain\-specific data used by AI systems
  • Create data quality frameworks that identify coverage gaps, ambiguity, drift, duplication, leakage, and other failure modes
  • Build tools and workflows that help teams turn raw customer data into usable context for retrieval, evaluation, reasoning, and execution
  • Partner with AI Researchers and AI Engineers to understand how data quality affects system behavior and production outcomes
  • Develop synthetic data, annotation, and feedback\-loop strategies to improve system performance in areas where real\-world data is sparse or noisy
  • Analyze customer workflows and datasets to determine what information AI systems need, where that information should come from, and how it should be represented
  • Communicate clearly with internal teams and customer stakeholders about data assumptions, limitations, risks, and tradeoffs

Who You Are

===============

  • Experience Building Data Systems for AI: You have built data pipelines, evaluation datasets, labeling workflows, retrieval corpora, or similar systems that improve model or agent behavior
  • Strong Data Engineering Fundamentals: You write clean Python and SQL, understand data modeling and pipeline reliability, and can build systems that are maintainable under production constraints
  • Research\-Oriented Builder: You are comfortable investigating how data quality, structure, and representation affect AI system performance
  • AI\-Native Working Style: You use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, debugging, exploration, and workflow automation
  • Comfort with Ambiguous Data: You can reason through messy enterprise datasets, incomplete documentation, conflicting business definitions, and changing requirements
  • Bias Towards Measurement: You prefer to make data quality and system behavior observable through concrete metrics, evaluations, and experiments
  • Customer Environment Readiness: You can work directly with customer teams to understand their data, ask precise questions, and explain tradeoffs clearly
  • Ownership Mentality: You take responsibility for whether the data layer enables the AI system to deliver reliable value in production

What We Offer

-----------------

  • The base salary range for this role is $150K – $250K, depending on experience, location, and level. In addition to base compensation, this role is eligible for meaningful equity, along with a comprehensive benefits package
  • 100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
  • 401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
  • Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
  • Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
  • A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence

Distyl has offices in San Francisco and New York. This role follows a hybrid collaboration model with 3\+ days per week (Tuesday–Thursday) in‑office.

*\#LI\-Hybrid*

We believe diverse perspectives make our work stronger and more impactful. We are an equal opportunity employer and evaluate all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

Salary Context

This $150K-$250K range is above the median for Research Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $202K across 52 roles with salary data).

View full Research Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company Distyl AI
Title Research Engineers, Data
Location New York, NY, US
Experience Mid Level
Salary $150K - $250K
Remote No

About This Role

Research Engineers bridge the gap between research and production. They implement papers, build experiment infrastructure, optimize training pipelines, and make research prototypes production-ready. They're the engineers who make research work at scale.

The role sits at a unique intersection. You need to understand the math well enough to implement novel architectures correctly, and you need the engineering chops to make them run efficiently on distributed systems. When a research scientist has a breakthrough idea, you're the person who turns it from a notebook prototype into a training pipeline that runs on 256 GPUs.

Across the 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, Research Engineer positions make up 2% of the market. At Distyl AI, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week involves: implementing a new attention mechanism from a recent paper, profiling and optimizing a training pipeline that's bottlenecked on data loading, building evaluation infrastructure for a new benchmark, debugging distributed training issues across a GPU cluster, and pair-programming with a research scientist on their latest experiment. The work is deeply technical.

Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.

Skills Required

Drift Ai (2% of roles) Python (52% of roles)

Strong software engineering fundamentals plus ML knowledge. Python, C++, and CUDA experience are common requirements. You'll need to read papers and turn ideas into working code. Distributed systems experience (especially distributed training) is highly valued. Performance optimization skills separate great candidates from good ones.

Experience with large-scale training infrastructure (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron), GPU programming (CUDA, Triton), and the internals of ML frameworks (PyTorch internals, custom autograd functions) is what makes candidates stand out. The best research engineers can debug issues that span the full stack from GPU memory management to numerical precision to algorithmic correctness.

Strong postings mention the team's recent research, the infrastructure scale, and the specific technical challenges. They often list the research areas you'd support. Look for roles that emphasize both implementation quality and research understanding.

Compensation Benchmarks

Research Engineer roles pay a median of $260,000 based on 434 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000. This role's midpoint ($200K) sits 23% below the category median. Disclosed range: $150K to $250K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.

Distyl AI AI Hiring

Distyl AI has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Research Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $250K - $250K.

Location Context

AI roles in New York pay a median of $211,000 across 2,643 tracked positions. That's 5% above the national median.

Career Path

Common paths into Research Engineer roles include Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Research Intern.

From here, career progression typically leads toward Senior Research Engineer, Research Scientist, ML Architect.

This is one of the best entry points into AI research without a PhD. Build a strong engineering portfolio with ML projects, contribute to open-source ML frameworks, and demonstrate that you can implement complex ideas correctly and efficiently. The transition to Research Scientist is possible with published first-author work, which some research engineer roles support.

What to Expect in Interviews

Technical screens test both engineering skill and research understanding. Expect coding rounds with performance-critical implementations (GPU optimization, efficient data loading). Be prepared to discuss papers relevant to the team's research area and explain how you'd implement key ideas. System design questions focus on training infrastructure: distributed training, experiment tracking, and compute resource management.

When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings mention the team's recent research, the infrastructure scale, and the specific technical challenges. They often list the research areas you'd support. Look for roles that emphasize both implementation quality and research understanding.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).

Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 434 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for Research Engineer positions is $260,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Strong software engineering fundamentals plus ML knowledge. Python, C++, and CUDA experience are common requirements. You'll need to read papers and turn ideas into working code. Distributed systems experience (especially distributed training) is highly valued. Performance optimization skills separate great candidates from good ones.
About 15% of the 3,823 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Distyl AI is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from Research Engineer positions include Senior Research Engineer, Research Scientist, ML Architect. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence

Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.