Senior Applied Research Engineer

About the role

The Senior Applied Research Engineer will drive the quality and effectiveness of Drata's AI systems through rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and applied research. This role emphasizes experimentation and rigor over production engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, semantic routing
• Prototype GenAI workflows (including agentic systems) that map and reason over compliance objects (controls ↔ risks ↔ requirements ↔ evidence)
• Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and structured prediction
• 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

Requirements

• 5+ 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
• Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden dataset creation, A/B testing, statistical significance
• Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows
• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable improvements

Qualifications

• Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization
• Publications or contributions in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluation

Skills

• Experience with compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains

Benefits

At Drata, we support our people with a total rewards package that includes:

• Stock equity
• Health & Wellness: Up to 100% employer-paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents, plus comprehensive wellness benefits and healthcare concierge services
• Financial Well-being: A comprehensive suite of financial benefits, including a 401(k) plan, company-paid life and disability insurance, tax-advantaged spending accounts, and a range of discounted voluntary offerings
• Family Support: Paid Parental Leave policy, fertility and family-building benefits, and dedicated leave specialists
• Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development, and access to internal learning opportunities
• Time Off & Flexibility: Flexible vacation policy, paid holidays, and other perks to recharge

Pay

$166,900 - $225,900

Schedule

Flexible, with high-impact collaboration days in-person Tuesday through Thursday in the Bay, and Monday and Friday remote.