Principal AI Architect

Job description

Draup is a Series A-funded agentic AI company building the intelligence layer for how global enterprises make workforce and go-to-market decisions. We work with 250+ enterprise clients — including 5 of the Fortune 10 — processing 1B+ job descriptions, 850M+ professional profiles, and signals from 100+ labor databases. We are now building our Silicon Valley engineering team — a small, senior group focused on next-generation AI research and product. Location: San Francisco, SoMa — minimum 4 days per week in-office. What you'll do • Define and own the architectural vision for next-generation AI systems: novel agent architectures, reasoning systems, and proprietary model development. • Prototype and evaluate breakthrough AI capabilities — predictive modeling, autonomous signal synthesis, multi-modal intelligence — that create defensible IP. • Set the technical foundations: data architecture, model serving, agent orchestration, and inference infrastructure for a multi-year product horizon. • Evaluate and adopt emerging AI paradigms (multi-agent reasoning, RLHF, retrieval-augmented fine-tuning) before they are mainstream. • Establish engineering standards, architecture review processes, and IP documentation practices for the team. What we require • BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field. PhD or equivalent research depth preferred. • 5+ years in AI/ML engineering with at least 2 years in a principal engineer or lead architect role. • Demonstrated history of building original AI systems that became products — not implementations of existing patterns. • Deep expertise across: LLM training and fine-tuning, agentic system design, knowledge graph construction, large-scale data modeling. • Comfort operating in greenfield conditions: high ambiguity, high ownership. • Patents, published research, or shipped products with clear proprietary differentiation are strong signals. • No visa sponsorship. Must be authorized to work in the US without current or future employer sponsorship.