Staff Applied 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. We pair that high-velocity culture with a thoughtful hybrid model because we believe flexibility and collaboration both matter. That’s why in the Bay we come together in-office Tuesday through Thursday our high‑impact collaboration days where teams align, strategize, and innovate. Mondays and Fridays are flexible, giving you space for focused work, balance, and autonomy. 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, at the vanguard of compliance software innovation and renowned for its commitment to trust and security across the internet, is on an ambitious path to redefine how AI and General AI technologies bolster compliance automation. Drata is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous research, experimentation, and evaluation. In this role, you will optimize retrieval strategies, build evaluation frameworks, and establish the scientific foundation that enables our AI features to deliver accurate, trustworthy results. This is a research-focused role emphasizing experimentation and rigor over production engineering. You'll work closely with AI Engineers handing off validated approaches for them to productionize while owning the quality metrics and evaluation systems that ensure our AI delivers on its promises. Drata's compliance platform is document-heavy: VRM Agent, AIQA, Trust Agent, policy-to-control mappers, and regulatory summarization all depend on retrieving the right information from large document sets. Your work will directly impact how well our AI understands and navigates compliance artifacts. What you'll do: - Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, structured retrieval, tool use, and multi-step workflows - Prototype GenAI workflows (including agentic systems) that map and reason over compliance objects (controls ↔ risks ↔ requirements) - Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and weak supervision - Build and maintain evaluation frameworks: golden datasets, automated quality metrics, regression detection - Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems: cross-encoders, LLM-based rerankers, learning-to-rank, custom scoring functions - Run experiments to validate hypotheses and quantify improvements before production rollout - Debug failure modes and build error taxonomies across retrieval, reasoning, and generation - Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to hand off validated approaches for productionization - Stay current on applied research in RAG, agents, LLM evaluation, and relevance modeling; bring innovations into the product What you'll bring: - 10+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems - 2+ years of hands-on experience building or contributing to production AI/ML systems - Strong foundation in information retrieval: dense and sparse retrieval, embedding models, search relevance - Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization - Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden dataset creation, A/B testing, statistical analysis - Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows - Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable recommendations - Bonus: Experience with compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains - Bonus: Publications or contributions in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluation Your contributions at Drata will not only shape the future of compliance and security automation but also solidify our standing as an innovator in the space, driving forward our mission with cutting-edge