ML Engineering Lead

About Distill

Distill is on a mission to empower professionals to excel through comprehensive, actionable insights on people and companies. In more simple terms, we’re using LLMs to create profiles on people and companies that are a summary of everything there is to know about them. You can think of it as AI generated Wikipedia pages for everyone else.

Distill is backed by top tier VCs (funding has yet to be announced) and was founded in 2024 by Russ Heddleston and Tim Su. Both are multi-time founders with exits under their belts who love building usable, delightful B2B software that targets the end user. Tim previously started and sold a todo app called Astrid to Yahoo! and then went on to start Tandem, a remote work communication tool backed by a16z. Russ previously started and sold Pursuit.com to Meta and then started and sold DocSend to Dropbox.

Distill is a remote-first team as Tim is happily settled in Mountain View and Russ is exploring NYC. Come join as we make use of LLMs to create delightful B2B software that end users love!

Role Overview:

As an ML engineering lead at Distill, you will be an integral part of our founding engineering team, responsible for building core ML services and improving our usage of large language models. Your scope will include generating datasets, designing, implementing and deploying ML models, and evaluating, and fine-tuning large language models - some of the tasks that you will tackle include: structured data extraction, summarization, search ranking, recommendation, categorization, building knowledge graphs and ontologies, and text generation. From a user perspective, you will help make people and company profile pages more accurate & faster to load, and help build out new experiences to enable research across the universe of people and companies. You will have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies, make decisions about long-term architecture, and contribute to the growth and success of our product.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, deploy and maintain ML models in production for information extraction, categorization, measuring quality and accuracy, summarization, ranking and other tasks

• Gather data sets across our platform and the web

• Keep up to date with latest ML / LLM / NLP research

• Work closely with the CTO and other technical staff to design, implement and monitor robust AI-based systems for building rich profiles of people and companies

• Collaborate to troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and improve reliability.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on machine learning

• Good understanding of recent developments in NLP, including transformers, language models, question answering and information retrieval

• Ability to work in a self-directed manner as the sole ML engineer on a team

• Experience training and deploying models to production systems

• Exceptional problem-solving skills and creativity in overcoming technical challenges.

• Ability to work independently and in a fast-paced startup environment.

Nice to Have:

• Experience working with production systems in Node.js / Typescript

• Experience leading and managing ML teams

• Experience serving models in a cloud platform (e.g. AWS Sagemaker)

• Experience with working with unstructured web scraping data

Why Join Us:

• A Proven Team: Tim and Russ have successfully built and sold multiple startups. Tim build and sold Astrid to Yahoo!. Russ most recently built and sold DocSend to Dropbox for $165m. Before that he started and sold Pursuit to Meta. They've done this before and are excited to do it again.

• Immediate Impact: Be part of a small, growing startup and make a significant impact on our product and users.

• Build Cool Stuff: Work with cutting-edge technologies and solve challenging problems.

• Highly Technical Team: Work and think with world-class engineers

• Collaborative Culture: At Distill, we foster a collaborative and egalitarian culture where the best idea wins. We assume good intent and are customer-focused, valuing diversity and creativity.

• Remote Team: Join a remote team that collaborates through a variety of online tools, with quarterly in-person meetups. Many of us are parents who understand the need for flexibility.

• Benefits: We offer health insurance, dental care, a home office stipend, and cover expenses for in-person team meetups.