Senior AI Engineer

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.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 wo