Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack / Agentic Engineering

About Distill

Distill gives every founder and executive a "mini-me" that does outreach for them. Customers would rather hear from founders than salespeople, but founders don't have the time. Distill does it for them: deep research on each person, tight and human messages that get industry-leading response rates, turning cold outreach into real conversations.

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 up in Whistler. Come join as we make use of LLMs to create delightful B2B software that end users love!

Role Overview:

As a Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Engineering at Distill, you'll make our product easier to use through agents and automation. You'll experiment with agentic and harness engineering, integrate across every part of our product, and work daily with our in-house concierge team to understand their workflow. Your job is to turn manual, repetitive work like automated outreach into something fast, reliable, and genuinely easy to use.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build agents and automation that make Distill easier to use across every part of the product

• Implement leading best practices on observability, evals, and agentic performance

• Experiment with agentic and harness engineering, figuring out what can be automated and what can't

• Work daily with our in-house concierge team to learn their workflow and turn it into reliable automation

• Make automated outreach faster, more accurate, and genuinely easy to use.

• Own features end to end, from talking to users to figure out the right thing to build, through shipping it

• Integrate with LLMs and tool-calling agents in production, building the harnesses that make them dependable

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with time spent owning features or initiatives end to end

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production, including tool-calling agents

• Experience owning some part of a product, including talking to users to figure out what to build

• Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to ship quickly in a fast-paced startup

• Ability to work independently and own a domain

• Proficiency in Node.js / TypeScript

Nice to Have:

• Experience working with Postgres in production

• Experience building outreach, automation, or internal tools

• Experience designing agent harnesses or evaluation frameworks for LLM systems

• Familiarity with prompt engineering and getting reliable behavior out of LLMs in production

Why Join Us:

• A Proven Team: Tim and Russ have successfully built and sold multiple startups. Tim built 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, low-ego 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.