[Remote] Staff AI Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Drata is a company focused on building trust through compliance solutions, and they are seeking a Staff AI Engineer to shape the architecture of AI systems that power enterprise workflows. This role involves making foundational decisions about AI systems, leading cross-team collaborations, and ensuring the quality and reliability of AI outputs.

Responsibilities

• Design and own production AI systems end-to-end (LLM pipelines, RAG, reranking, vector stores, orchestration)
• Make thoughtful build/don’t-build decisions based on real data
• Evolve our AI stack over time, from model infrastructure to workflow orchestration to evaluation tooling
• Design evaluation systems that measure retrieval quality, reasoning accuracy, end-to-end performance
• Build tooling that helps the team iterate confidently and catch regressions early
• Define how we measure success across the platform
• Analyze production outputs to identify failure patterns and root causes
• Turn complex findings into clear technical recommendations
• Know when to push forward and when to pause based on data
• Be the go-to technical voice for AI architecture decisions
• Influence standards for how LLM systems are built, tested, deployed, and monitored
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews and hands-on collaboration
• Partner with product and compliance teams to translate domain complexity into clean technical solutions
• Ship systems optimized for latency, cost, reliability, and auditability
• Embed safety guardrails, confidence thresholds, and human-in-the-loop workflows
• Ensure outputs are traceable and explainable

Skills

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years working directly on ML/AI systems
• Real ownership of production LLM systems
• Deep experience with RAG, embeddings, reranking, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Chroma, etc.), and agentic workflows
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and using quantitative analysis to improve system performance
• Strong Python skills (TypeScript is a plus)
• A track record of making architectural decisions that shape team direction
• Experience operating AI systems in production - observability, reliability, cost tradeoffs
• The ability to break down ambiguous, high-stakes problems into structured investigations
• Clear communication skills and comfort working cross-functionally
• Experience in compliance, security, or other regulated domains
• Familiarity with enterprise data platforms or Snowflake-based analytics
• Experience with orchestration systems like Temporal or Airflow
• Experience building or using LLM evaluation platforms (e.g., Braintrust)
• Contributions to technical communities or published work

Benefits

• Shared Success: We provide stock equity to ensure that as the company grows, you share directly in that success.
• Health & Wellness: Up to 100% employer-paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents.
• Financial Well-being: A comprehensive suite of financial benefits, including a 401(k) plan, company-paid life and disability insurance.
• 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.
• Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development.
• Time Off & Flexibility: We believe that to do your best work, you should get the time you need for rest, rejuvenation and recovery.

Company Overview

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