Senior AI Engineer

Job description

Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: - Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. - Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. - A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. - Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. - A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here https://drata.com/about/careers/life and follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/drata/posts/?feedView=all for company news, employee stories, and career updates. 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 https://drata.com/about/life-at-drata?utm_source=chatgpt.com. - 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: 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. This role will receive a competitive base salary, benefits, and/or stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for each US-based role is based on where the employee works and is aligned to one of 3 tiers based on the cost of labor for that geographic area. The expected ranges for this role are set forth below, subject to change. Tier 1: $192,000 - $259,800 Tier 2: $172,800 - $233,800 Tier 3: $153,600 - $207,800 You can view which tier applies to where you plan to work here https://drata.com/career-tiers. 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.