Staff 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. 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. 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. Job Summary: At Drata, we’re rethinking how compliance gets done, and AI is a core part of that. We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer to help shape how intelligent systems power trust-critical enterprise workflows. This isn’t a “build a feature and move on” role. You’ll help define how AI is architected across the company. You’ll make foundational decisions about what we build, how we measure quality, and where we invest. From early research to production deployment, you’ll own systems end-to-end, and your judgment will directly influence our technical direction. You’ll work at the intersection of LLMs, retrieval systems, agentic workflows, and real-world compliance challenges, partnering closely with product, platform, and security teams to build AI that’s powerful, reliable, and responsible. What you’ll Do: SHAPE THE ARCHITECTURE - Design and own production AI systems end-to-end (LLM pipelines, RAG, reranking, vector stores, orchestration). - Make thoughtful build/don’t-build decisions based on real data. - Evolve our AI stack over time, from model infrastructure to workflow orchestration to evaluation tooling. RAISE THE QUALITY BAR - Design evaluation systems that measure retrieval quality, reasoning accuracy, end-to-end performance. - Build tooling that helps the team iterate confidently and catch regressions early. - Define how we measure success across the platform. INVESTIGATE DEEPLY & DECIDE WITH EVIDENCE - Analyze production outputs to identify failure patterns and root causes. - Turn complex findings into clear technical recommendations. - Know when to push forward and when to pause based on data. LEAD ACROSS TEAMS - Be the go-to technical voice for AI architecture decisions. - Influence standards for how LLM systems are built, tested, deployed, and monitored. - Mentor senior engineers through design reviews and hands-on collaboration. - Partner with product and compliance teams to translate domain complexity into clean technical solutions. BUILD RESPONSIBLE, PRODUCTION-READY AI - Ship systems optimized for latency, cost, reliability, and auditability. - Embed safety guardrails, confidence thresholds, and human-in-the-loop workflows. - Ensure outputs are traceable and explainable. What you’ll bring: - 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years working directly on ML/AI systems. - Real ownership of production LLM systems. - Deep experience with RAG, embeddings, reranking, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Chroma, etc.), and agentic workflows. - Experience designing evaluation frameworks and using quantitative analysis to improve system performance. - Strong Python skills (TypeScript is a plus). - A track record of making architectural decisions that shape team direction. - Experience operating AI systems in production - observability, reliability, cost tradeoffs. - The ability to break down ambiguous, high-stakes problems into structured investigations. - Clear communication skills and comfort working cross-functionally. Nice to have: - Experience in compliance, security, or other regulated domains. - Familiarity with enterprise data platforms or Snowflake-based analytics. - Experience with orchestration systems like Temporal or Airflow. - Experience building or using LLM evaluation platforms (e.g., Braintrust). - Contributions to technical communities or published work. Why this role matters: You won’t just ship features - you’ll help define how AI is built at Drata. Your work will: - Set the architectural foundation for our AI systems. - Establish the quality ba