Forward Deployed AI Engineer - Enterprise Lead

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.

Enterprise Lead AI Engineers are senior technical leaders accountable for the technical success of Distyl’s most complex enterprise AI deployments. They may own one large customer engagement or provide technical oversight across multiple smaller accounts, maintaining technical coherence across workstreams, developing technical leaders, and ensuring production AI systems deliver durable business value in complex customer environments.

This role is for leaders who can operate across altitudes: reasoning with customer executives about tradeoffs and delivery risk, setting architecture across multiple teams, developing Forward Deployed AI Engineer Leads and senior engineers, and staying close enough to the work to make sound technical judgments about AI system behavior, code quality, evaluations, integrations, and production reliability.

• Lead the technical success of complex enterprise AI deployments, either across one large customer engagement or a portfolio of smaller accounts, often spanning multiple use cases, production systems, workstreams, and teams

• Set technical direction across engagements, ensuring architecture, system behavior, evaluation strategy, integrations, and operational practices remain coherent as deployments grow

• Develop Forward Deployed AI Engineer Leads, senior ICs, and emerging technical leaders, raising the bar for technical judgment, code quality, customer communication, and production ownership

• Serve as the senior technical partner to customer executives, enterprise architects, and business partners, building trust through clear communication, sound judgment, and reliable delivery

• Maintain technical proximity to live systems by reviewing designs, interrogating system behavior, debugging critical issues, guiding evaluation strategy, and participating in incident reviews and production quality improvements

• Use AI-native engineering practices to increase your own leverage and model effective use of AI tools for design, implementation, debugging, analysis, experimentation, and operational improvement

• Partner with company leadership on staffing, organizational design, leadership development, and customer expansion as engagements grow from pilot to enterprise-scale deployment

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading technical teams through ambiguous, high-stakes production delivery

• Multi-team technical leadership. You have led technical execution across multiple teams, workstreams, accounts, or senior engineers. You know how to create clarity, set standards, develop leaders, and keep teams aligned without becoming a bottleneck

• Talent development. You raise the capability of the engineers around you. You can coach Tech Leads, senior ICs, and emerging leaders, and you know how to build a talent-dense engineering team over time. Prior people management experience is strongly preferred, but not required if you have demonstrated organizational leadership across multi-team engineering efforts

• Enterprise technical ownership. You take responsibility for whether complex technical deployments deliver durable customer value. You can reason across architecture, delivery risk, team capability, customer constraints, system behavior, and production operations

• Technical proximity and judgment. You can still reason deeply about production software. You understand architecture, debugging, testing, observability, performance, maintainability, security, and code quality. While you mostly operate through your teams, you are willing and able to do selective, high-leverage technical work when it materially improves outcomes

• Customer and executive judgment. You can operate effectively in high-trust, high-visibility customer environments. You communicate clearly with executives, IT leaders, data teams, and operational SMEs about system behavior, delivery tradeoffs, risks, and limitations

• AI-native working style. You use AI tools daily to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, automate repetitive work, and improve your own leverage. You are curious about new model capabilities and actively incorporate them into how you lead and build

• Willingness to travel. Travel is typically 20–40%, depending on the project, customer needs, and your role on the engagement

• The base salary range for this role is $180K – $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.