Senior AI Engineer

About this role

Our Mission & Values: At Drata, we help companies earn and keep the trust of their users, customers, partners, and prospects. We’re the proof layer that shows great companies deserve the trust they aim to build. We live our values every day. Built on Trust means consistency is everything. Act with Integrity by always doing the right thing. Being Customer-Obsessed keeps the people we serve at the center of our work. Competitive Fire drives us to push ourselves harder than anyone else. Diversity brings unique perspectives that lead to better solutions. Automation First ensures we save time and money by making efficiency a priority. Our Culture & Work Style 🚀 At Drata, we’re not just building software - we’re building a mindset. Everything we do springs from: - Be a Driver (Owner‑Operator Mentality): Own your work. Improve relentlessly. Deliver results. - Move at Drata Speed (Precision & Velocity): Fast decisions. Quick learning. Immediate impact. - Stay Mission-Driven (Customer‑Obsessed): Challenge assumptions. Deliver value. Stay hungry. While we’re ideally looking for someone who can join us in a hybrid capacity from our San Francisco office, we know great talent isn’t limited by zip code. We’ll consider remote candidates across the U.S. who are a strong match for the role. If you thrive when you’re empowered, energized, and working with smart, mission-driven people, you’ll feel at home here. Why Join The Drata Team? The best way to understand the Driver’s Mindset is to see it in action. We’re an award-winning, mission-driven team of 600+ people worldwide, united by a culture that values trust, speed, and continuous growth. - See the Speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QidTdkGwKMY Watch our CEO, Adam Markowitz, discuss the hyper-growth journey, from $0 to $100M ARR in just four years - Hear the Voice of the Team https://drata.com/about/life-at-drata: Explore our "Life at Drata" page for employee testimonials on our collaborative and the growth opportunities available. - Experience the Impact https://www.greatplacetowork.com/certified-company/7044563: See why we are consistently recognized on Fortune's Best Workplaces lists. - Connect with Us on Socials: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/drata/posts/?feedView=all - follow us for company updates, employee stories, and career news. Job Summary: Drata is advancing the frontier of compliance automation by integrating intelligent AI capabilities into its platform. We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer to help design, build, and scale robust, high-impact AI systems that improve operational efficiency, enhance decision-making, and support trust-critical enterprise workflows. This role focuses on solving complex, real-world problems with agentic AI, LLMs, and intelligent reasoning systems, including automating questionnaire answering and other compliance-related workflows. You will work on creating generalizable AI solutions that can be applied across multiple products and domains, collaborating with cross-functional teams to bring cutting-edge research into production-ready systems. As a Senior AI Engineer, you will own the end-to-end design, implementation, and evolution of AI-driven systems embedded directly into Drata’s core platform. Your work will focus on building generalizable, reusable AI capabilities rather than one-off features, enabling multiple product surfaces and workflows across compliance and security. What you'll do: Build Agentic & Intelligent AI Systems - Design and implement LLM-powered systems capable of multi-step reasoning, evidence grounding, and decision support in high-trust domains. - Develop agentic workflows that combine retrieval, tool use, structured reasoning, and human oversight. - Create interactive AI experiences that allow users to engage naturally with complex compliance and risk data. Automated Reasoning Over Regulations & Evidence - Build AI systems that reason over structured and unstructured data to support regulatory interpretation, control alignment, and evidence validation. - Ensure AI outputs are traceable, explainable, and auditable, meeting the expectations of enterprise customers and auditors. Production-Grade AI Architecture - Architect and deploy scalable LLM + retrieval + agent systems in production environments. - Optimize for latency, cost, reliability, and evaluation in real-world enterprise workloads. - Partner with platform, security, product teams, and other application development teams with diverse skill sets to operationalize AI safely and effectively. Responsible & Trustworthy AI - Embed human-in-the-loop workflows, confidence thresholds, and safety guardrails into AI systems. - Ensure privacy-preserving data handling, robust failure modes, and transparent behavior aligned with Drata’s trust principles. What you'll bring: - Experience: 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience; 2+ years specifically in ML/AI engineering. - Programming Languages: Proficiency in Python; TypeScript experience is a plus, especially for production AI system integrations. - Retrieval & Vector Stores: Familiarity with vector databases (Pinecone, Chroma, FAISS, etc.) and RAG system design. - LLM & AI Systems: Proven experience building and shipping LLM-based applications in production, including embeddings, RAG, agent frameworks, prompt engineering, and evaluation. - Production Expertise: Track record of taking AI systems from concept to production, designing scalable, maintainable solutions. - Problem Solving: Ability to decompose complex tasks into agentic workflows and reason over high-stakes, structured, and unstructured data. - Collaboration: Experience working cross-functionally with product, compliance, security, engineering teams, and partnering with other application development teams with diverse skill sets. Bonus Qualifications: - Experience in compliance, security, risk, or audit domains. - Familiarity with S