Staff AI Engineer

Job Summary

The role involves shaping how intelligent systems power trust-critical enterprise workflows. You'll help define AI architecture, make foundational decisions, and influence standards for AI system development.

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 bar that lets us move fast with confidence. Ensure our technical investments are grounded in evidence. Raise the technical bar across the AI organization.

How We Support You

• Shared Success: We provide stock equity to ensure that as the company grows, you share directly in that success.
• Health & Wellness: Up to 100% employer-paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents, along with comprehensive wellness benefits and healthcare concierge services designed to support your needs beyond traditional insurance.
• 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 to help you customize and strengthen your overall financial position.
• Family Support: We want to support you in life's most important moments, so we offer a paid Parental Leave policy, after six months of employment. Employees also receive access to Kindbody fertility and family-building benefits and dedicated leave specialists who help guide you through the entire process.
• Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development, empowering you to invest in your continued growth. You’ll also have access to a wide range of internal learning opportunities, ensuring you can build new skills, deepen your expertise, and advance your career with confidence.
• Time Off & Flexibility: We believe that to do your best work, you should get the time you need for rest, rejuvenation and recovery. Drata offers a flexible vacation policy, paid holidays, and other perks to recharge.