Staff Applied Research Engineer
$220.8k - $298.8kCareers at Drata
- Staff Applied Research EngineerHybrid - San FranciscoApply**Our Mission & Values:** At Drata, we help companies earn and keep the trust of their users, customers, partners, and prospects. We’re the proof layer that shows great companies deserve the trust they aim to build.We live our values every day. Built on Trust means consistency is everything. Act with Integrity by always doing the right thing. Being Customer-Obsessed keeps the people we serve at the center of our work. Competitive Fire drives us to push ourselves harder than anyone else. Diversity brings unique perspectives that lead to better solutions. Automation First ensures we save time and money by making efficiency a priority.**Our Culture & Work Style **At Drata, we’re not just building software - we’re building a mindset. Everything we do springs from:* **Be a Driver (Owner‐Operator Mentality):** Own your work. Improve relentlessly. Deliver results.* **Move at Drata Speed (Precision & Velocity):** Fast decisions. Quick learning. Immediate impact.* **Stay Mission-Driven (Customer‐Obsessed):** Challenge assumptions. Deliver value. Stay hungry.We pair that high-velocity culture with a **thoughtful hybrid model** because we believe flexibility and collaboration both matter. That’s why in the Bay we come together **in-office Tuesday through Thursday** our high‐impact collaboration days where teams align, strategize, and innovate. Mondays and Fridays are flexible, giving you space for focused work, balance, and autonomy.If you thrive when you’re empowered, energized, and working with smart, mission-driven people, you’ll feel at home here.**Why Join The Drata Team?**The best way to understand the Driver’s Mindset is to see it in action. We’re an award-winning, mission-driven team of **600+ people worldwide**, united by a culture that values trust, speed, and continuous growth.* See the Speed: Watch our CEO, Adam Markowitz, discuss the hyper-growth journey, from $0 to $100M ARR in just four years* Hear the Voice of the Team: Explore our "Life at Drata" page for employee testimonials on our collaborative and the growth opportunities available.* Experience the Impact: See why we are consistently recognized on Fortune's Best Workplaces lists.* Connect with Us on Socials: LinkedIn - follow us for company updates, employee stories, and career news.**Job Summary:**Drata, at the vanguard of compliance software innovation and renowned for its commitment to trust and security across the internet, is on an ambitious path to redefine how AI and General AI technologies bolster compliance automation.Drata is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous research, experimentation, and evaluation. In this role, you will optimize retrieval strategies, build evaluation frameworks, and establish the scientific foundation that enables our AI features to deliver accurate, trustworthy results.This is a research-focused role emphasizing experimentation and rigor over production engineering. You'll work closely with AI Engineers handing off validated approaches for them to productionize while owning the quality metrics and evaluation systems that ensure our AI delivers on its promises.Drata's compliance platform is document-heavy: VRM Agent, AIQA, Trust Agent, policy-to-control mappers, and regulatory summarization all depend on retrieving the right information from large document sets. Your work will directly impact how well our AI understands and navigates compliance artifacts.**What you'll do:*** **Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies** across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, structured retrieval, tool use, and multi-step workflows* **Prototype GenAI workflows** (including agentic systems) that map and reason over compliance objects (controls risks requirements)* **Explore ML + probabilistic approaches** where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and weak supervision* **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:*** 10+ 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 analysis* Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows* Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable recommendations* Bonus: Experience with compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains* Bonus: Publications or contributions in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluationYour contributions at Drata will not only shape the future of compliance and security automation but also solidify our standing as an innovator in the space, driving forward our mission with cutting-edge technology.**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: $220,800 - $298,800.*
- J-18808-Ljbffr Careers at Drata
Vacancy posted 5 hours ago
Similar jobs that could be interesting for youBased on the Staff Applied Research Engineer in San Francisco, CA vacancy
$197.3k - $313.7k
...best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12... ...looking for talented software and platform engineers to embed in our AI team to bridge the gap... ...skills directly enable world-class research and products used by millions?At Salesforce...SuggestedFull time$315k
As a Research Engineer or Research Scientist in Applied Finetuning, you will directly train the models we launch to the public via Claude.AI and our API. In... ...Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time....SuggestedWork at officeHome officeVisa sponsorshipRelocation package- ...infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018, we've been pioneering... ...through clear ownership and metrics. Role Overview As an Applied Research Engineer, you will be at the forefront of developing cutting-edge systems...SuggestedFlexible hours
- Applied Research Engineer - San Francisco As an applied research engineer at Confidential, you’ll build high performance building blocks and large scale pipelines to understand video with high precision at internet scale. Often this involves working on ambiguous research...Suggested
$145.2k - $196.4k
Location Hybrid - San Francisco Employment Type Full time Department Engineering Job Summary Drata is seeking an Applied Research Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and applied research. This...SuggestedFull timeFlexible hours- ...signals, and evaluation ownership. Every applied AI company we benchmark against like... ...scale, every day. We see exactly where research meets production and where the data is dirty... ...systems alongside elite and competitive engineering minds. Translate findings into infrastructure...Relocation
$150k - $350k
davidjoseph-co is hiring a Member of Technical Staff in Applied Research to develop cutting-edge video understanding pipelines. This full-time, on-site position in San Francisco offers a competitive salary between $150,000 and $350,000 along with equity options. The role...Full time- The role As an applied research engineer, you’ll own customer engagements end-to-end: understanding their data, their workflows, and their problems, then building and deploying agents that deliver real value. For our largest customers, you'll train custom models tailored...Work at officeVisa sponsorshipRelocation package
- Hebbia, Inc. in San Francisco is seeking an Applied Research Engineer focusing on natural language processing systems. This role involves enabling agentic capabilities and owning experiments that combine research with high-value customer problems. The ideal candidate should...
$150k - $350k
David Joseph & Company is looking for an applied research engineer in San Francisco, CA, to build high-performance pipelines for video understanding. You'll tackle challenging research problems across computer vision and audio processing. The ideal candidate has over 3...- ...collaborates with leading AI organizations and operates in a research-driven, high-growth environment where engineers address complex technical challenges at scale. About The Role We are seeking an Applied Research Engineer to develop scalable systems and high-performance...Full timeH1bVisa sponsorship
- ...with companies to bring AI into real hiring workflows. We also run an applied AI team that studies where today's models succeed and fail across industries. The Role We're hiring a Research Engineer to join our Applied AI team in San Francisco. You'll design and build reinforcement...Relocation
$160k - $300k
...experiences for matrix and deep, multi-source research. We’ve built our own agentic frameworks... ...most powerful and scalable LLM inference engine - a distributed, asynchronous DAG... ...multi billion dollar M&A. The Role As an Applied Research Engineer, you will be the bridge...$250k - $300k
...critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018, we've been pioneering data-... ...(e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.). Labelbox Applied Research At Labelbox Applied Research, we're committed to...Work at officeFlexible hours2 days per week$160k - $300k
An innovative AI firm in New York is looking for an Applied Research Engineer to enhance their natural language processing systems. The candidate will analyze complex data, develop models, and collaborate with engineers to integrate capabilities. The position demands a...$145.2k - $196.4k
Drata is looking for an Applied Research Engineer to enhance AI system effectiveness through rigorous research and experimentation. You'll collaborate with engineers to implement validated methods into production systems while focusing on information retrieval and reasoning...- Drata is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer in San Francisco to enhance the quality of our AI systems through rigorous experimentation and applied research. This hybrid role requires working closely with AI and Software Engineers to create production-ready systems...
- Drata is looking for a Senior Applied Research Engineer to enhance the quality of our AI systems through thorough evaluation and research. In this role, you'll design and evaluate information access strategies, prototype workflows, and run validation experiments while collaborating...
- ...simulation, planning, and verification into human‑in‑the‑loop decision‑support systems for defense applications. As an Applied AI Research Engineer, you’ll focus on human‑machine teaming and agentic AI to build systems that allow warfighters, planners, analysts, and decision...Remote workRelocation packageFlexible hours
- Cacheflow in San Francisco is looking for an Applied Research Engineer to enhance AI systems through testing and applied research. This hybrid role focuses on designing information access strategies and collaborating with engineers to transition validated methods to production...
- LlamaIndex is hiring an AI Research Engineer to join the document understanding team in San Francisco. You will work at the intersection of applied research and engineering, prototyping quickly and turning promising approaches into production systems used by customers....
- HeyMilo AI is hiring a Research Engineer to join our Applied AI team in San Francisco. You’ll design and build reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards for real-world use cases, creating simulators, reward functions, and evaluation harnesses to measure...
- Artificial Analysis, Inc. in San Francisco is seeking a Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI Research). You will design novel frontier evaluations, build datasets and infrastructure, and evaluate every major model as it is released. This applied research role directly...
- ...Applied Scientist / Research Engineer â Speech AI Â HIGHLIGHTS Location: Â San Francisco, CA OR REMOTE Position Type: Â Direct Hire Salary: Â Based on Experience Residency Status: Â US Citizen or Green Card Holder Only We are looking...Remote work
- Salesforce, Inc. is seeking an Applied Research Engineer to join their AI team in San Francisco. This role involves building and deploying the next generation of AI-enabled services while working closely with research scientists. You will be responsible for designing and...
$110.7k - $379.2k
Position Summary Research Engineer — Post-Training & Small Language Models (SLMs), Healthcare AI Three hundred fifty million Americans... ...is faster, fairer, and far less wasteful. This is not AI applied at the margins. It is a ground-up rebuild of the decision-making...Local areaVisa sponsorship- Factory is seeking innovative Research Engineers to design and integrate advanced AI and ML capabilities that revolutionize productivity and... ....Demonstrated proficiency with LLMs and a track record of applying AI/ML techniques to solve complex, unstructured problems, ideally...Work at office
$200k - $225k
About AlembicAlembic is where top engineers are solving marketing's hardest problem: proving... ...for frontier technical challenges at an applied science company, this is the place.At... ...to leverage advanced analyticsDocument research and implementation decisions for reproducibility...$164.6k - $313.3k
...(SODA) is looking for a driven Data/ML engineer to push the boundaries of audio GenAI. Join... ...re a small, collaborative and efficient research team looking for highly motivated... ...location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based...Full timeTemporary workLocal areaWorldwide- ...Research EngineerConsole is building the AI agents that power autonomous enterprises. We... ...us.About the RoleWe're hiring a Research Engineer to push Console's core agent loop from powerful... ....This role sits at the intersection of applied AI engineering and research. You'll...Work at office
Console
San Francisco, CA2 days ago
Do you want to receive more vacancies?
Subscribe and receive similar vacancies to Staff Applied Research Engineer. Be the first to apply!
Related searches
- software engineer staff San Francisco, CA
- assistant engineer San Francisco, CA
- engineering aide San Francisco, CA
- staff engineer San Francisco, CA
- staff security engineer San Francisco, CA
- assistant mechanical engineer San Francisco, CA
- assistant engineering manager San Francisco, CA
- senior staff systems engineer San Francisco, CA
- technology administrator San Francisco, CA
- project engineer assistant project manager San Francisco, CA