Senior Applied Research Engineer

Senior Applied Research Engineer

Drata is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and applied research.

This is a research-focused role emphasizing experimentation and rigor over production engineering. You'll own the science behind how Drata's AI products retrieve, reason, and respond — and you'll work closely with AI and Software Engineers to turn validated approaches into production-ready systems.

Drata's compliance platform is document-heavy: VRM Agent, AIQA, Trust Agent, policy-to-control mappers, and more all depend on high-quality information retrieval and reasoning.

What you'll do:

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, semantic routing

• Prototype GenAI workflows (including agentic systems) that map and reason over compliance objects (controls ↔ risks ↔ requirements ↔ evidence)

• Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and structured prediction

• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks: golden datasets, automated quality metrics, regression detection

• Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems: cross-encoders, LLM-based rerankers, learning-to-rank, custom scoring functions

• Run experiments to validate hypotheses and quantify improvements before production rollout

• Debug failure modes and build error taxonomies across retrieval, reasoning, and generation

• Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to hand off validated approaches for productionization

• Stay current on applied research in RAG, agents, LLM evaluation, and relevance modeling; bring innovations into the product

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems

• 2+ years of hands-on experience building or contributing to production AI/ML systems

• Strong foundation in information retrieval: dense and sparse retrieval, embedding models, search relevance

• Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization

• Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden dataset creation, A/B testing, statistical significance

• Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows

• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable improvements

• Bonus: Experience with compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains

• Bonus: Publications or contributions in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluation

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: 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 stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for this role is: $166,900 - $225,900.

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.