Drata
Senior Applied AI Engineer 2
Hybrid - San Francisco · Senior
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$8,131 more — $165,131 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $165,131 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- This is a research-focused role emphasizing experimentation and rigor over production engineering.
- Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and structured prediction
- Stay current on applied research in RAG, agents, LLM evaluation, and relevance modeling; bring innovations into the product
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain evaluation frameworks: golden datasets, automated quality metrics, regression detection
- 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
- 2+ years of hands-on experience building or contributing to production AI/ML systems
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems
- Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization
- Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden dataset creation, A/B testing, statistical significance
Skills
- Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows
Compensation
- Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development, empowering you to invest in your continued growth.
Benefits
- Our total rewards package is designed to power your well-being, accelerate your growth, and keep your work-life balance thriving.
- 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.
- Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems: cross-encoders, LLM-based rerankers, learning-to-rank, custom scoring functions
Company info
- 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.
- See what they say here https://drata.com/about/careers/life and follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/drata/posts/?feedView=all for company news, employee stories, and career updates.
This listing is sourced directly from Drata's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.