Senior Applied Research Engineer

Drata is a company focused on helping organizations build trust through their compliance platform. They are seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to enhance their AI systems through experimentation and applied research, collaborating closely with engineers to transition validated methods into production-ready solutions.

Responsibilities:

• 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