Senior AI Engineer

Drata • Full-time • San Francisco, California, United States • $192k - $237k / year • 1d ago

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 where 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: 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: Explore our "Life at Drata" page for employee testimonials on our collaborative and the growth opportunities available.
Experience the Impact: See why we are consistently recognized on Fortune's Best Workplaces lists.
Connect with Us on Socials: LinkedIn - 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 Snowflake-based analytics, knowledge graphs, or enterprise data platforms.
Experience partnering with non-technical stakeholders such as compliance or GRC teams.

This role defines how AI is responsibly embedded into a trust-critical enterprise platform. Your work will:

Establish foundational agentic AI capabilities that power multiple present and future product experiences.
Enable customers to derive accurate, explainable insights from complex compliance and security data.
Set the technical and ethical standard for applying modern AI in regulated, high-stakes environments.

How we support you:

At Drata, our people are our strongest advantage—and we prove it with support that exceeds industry standards. Our total rewards package is designed to power your well-being, accelerate your growth, and keep your work-life balance thriving.

Explore how we invest in your Life at Drata.

Shared Success: We provide stock equity to ensure that as the company grows, you share directly in that success. Equity gives every employee a sense of ownership and the opportunity to celebrate our wins together—because your contributions don’t just support our progress; they help drive our collective 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: Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave (after six months of employment), along with a robust suite of family-support resources. 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.

This role will receive a competitive base salary, benefits, and stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for this role is: $192,000 - $237,100.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s leveling and compensation–including a candidate’s professional background and experience. These ranges may be modified in the future and final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.

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