Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer

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: 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. 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.