Forward Deployed Architect

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, we build AI systems that operate inside the most complex enterprise environments in the world. Doing this well requires AI Architects who can take full ownership of how intelligent systems are structured, integrated, secured, and operated in production—while remaining deeply hands-on in the work.

Forward Deployed AI Architects are experienced builders with the technical judgment to design and evolve end-to-end AI systems across real enterprise stacks. They operate as trusted technical counterparts to customer engineering leadership, security teams, and operators, and are expected to make and defend architectural decisions that balance capability, risk, and operational reality. Their authority comes from execution, not title.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical shape of AI systems deployed in customer environments

• Define how models, agents, data pipelines, APIs, and orchestration layers fit together, how those systems integrate with existing enterprise infrastructure, and how they are operated safely and reliably at scale. Their focus is on cross-cutting architectural patterns that span multiple customer systems, ensuring consistency, safety, and long-term evolvability across deployments

• Hands-on throughout the lifecycle—building reference implementations, reviewing and evolving production systems, and stepping in directly on high-risk or high-impact technical problems

• Accountable for architectural coherence across teams and over time, ensuring that systems remain composable, secure, observable, and adaptable as requirements evolve

• Investigate how AI systems, legacy systems, and human operators interact in practice.

• Identify failure modes, risk surfaces, and integration bottlenecks, and establish guardrails and patterns that allow teams to move quickly without sacrificing safety, auditability, or correctness

• Act as peers to senior technical leaders in customer engagements—whiteboarding architectures, pressure-testing assumptions, and translating business objectives into concrete, executable system designs. They influence direction through clarity of reasoning and demonstrated delivery, not escalation

What We Require

• 5+ years of software engineering experience

• Proven Ownership of Complex System Architecture: You have designed, built, and operated complex distributed systems in production, and have taken responsibility for how those systems evolve over time. You are comfortable making irreversible or high-impact architectural decisions and owning their consequences

• Depth in AI Systems and Integration: You can reason fluently about how AI components—models, agents, retrieval, evaluation, orchestration—interact with data platforms, APIs, and existing services. You understand how design choices affect reliability, latency, security, and debuggability in real deployments

• Strong Security and Risk Intuition: You bring a security-first mindset to system design, with practical experience around data access, identity, auditability, and compliance. You can articulate tradeoffs clearly and design systems that satisfy enterprise risk requirements without crippling velocity

• Hands-On Execution: You write and review production code, build critical integration paths, and stay close to the system. You are comfortable dropping into ambiguous, high-stakes technical situations and unblocking progress through direct execution

• Customer-Facing Technical Credibility: You can engage confidently with senior customer engineers and operators, ask sharp questions, and earn trust through technical depth and follow-through. You are able to represent Distyl as a long-term technical partner in complex enterprise environments

• Travel: Travel between 10-50% of the time, depending on the project, your role and level of interest in doing so

What We Offer

• 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..

We’re grateful for the strong interest in this role. The best way to get your profile in front of our team is to apply directly through our careers page, where all applications are reviewed. Due to the high volume of interest, we’re not able to review or respond to all direct emails or LinkedIn messages. We will be in touch with every applicant once we’ve completed our review, regardless of the decision.

#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.