Staff AI Engineer

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹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 the AI stack from model infrastructure to workflow orchestration to evaluation tooling
• ▹Design evaluation systems measuring retrieval quality, reasoning accuracy, and end-to-end performance
• ▹Analyze production outputs to identify failure patterns and root causes
• ▹Be the go-to technical voice for AI architecture decisions, mentor senior engineers
• ▹Partner with product and compliance teams to translate domain complexity into clean technical solutions
• ▹Embed safety guardrails, confidence thresholds, and human-in-the-loop workflows

Requirements

• ▹10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years on ML/AI systems
• ▹Real ownership of production LLM systems
• ▹Deep experience with RAG, embeddings, reranking, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Chroma), and agentic workflows
• ▹Experience designing evaluation frameworks and using quantitative analysis
• ▹Strong Python skills (TypeScript a plus)
• ▹A track record of architectural decisions that shape team direction
• ▹Experience operating AI systems in production: observability, reliability, cost tradeoffs

Nice to have

• ▹Experience in compliance, security, or other regulated domains
• ▹Familiarity with Snowflake-based analytics or enterprise data platforms
• ▹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

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Equity (RSUs)
• ▹Up to 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage
• ▹401(k) plan, company-paid life and disability insurance
• ▹Paid parental leave after six months of employment
• ▹Annual stipends for professional and personal development
• ▹Flexible vacation policy and paid holidays
• ▹Hybrid from San Francisco or remote across the US

About the company

Drata is the trust-management platform that helps companies earn and keep the trust of users, customers, and partners through compliance automation. An award-winning, mission-driven team of 600+ people worldwide.