Applied AI Research Engineer

Cacheflow; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 221,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Health and wellness benefits

401(k) plan

Parental Leave

Job summary

Drata, at the vanguard of compliance software innovation, is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous research and evaluation.

You will optimize retrieval strategies, prototype GenAI workflows, and collaborate with AI engineers and software teams to productionize validated approaches, owning the quality metrics and evaluation systems that ensure trustworthy results.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of applied research, data science, or ML focusing on NLP or IR.
• 2+ years building or contributing to production AI/ML systems.
• Strong information retrieval foundation: dense and sparse retrieval, embeddings, relevance.
• Experience with RAG systems: chunking, vector databases, retrieval optimization.
• Strong Python skills and notebook-driven research workflows.
• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams.
• Bonus: Compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains.
• Bonus: Publications in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and ML.
• Prototype GenAI workflows mapping compliance objects for reasoning.
• Explore ML probabilistic approaches where GenAI isn’t best.
• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks with golden datasets and metrics.
• Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems and scoring functions.
• Run experiments to validate hypotheses before production rollout.
• Debug failure modes and build taxonomies across retrieval, reasoning, generation.
• Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to productionize validated approaches.
• Stay current on applied research in RAG, agents, and evaluation.

Skills

NLP/IR research

Production AI/ML systems

Information retrieval

RAG systems

Python programming

Research communication

Publications (IR/NLP)

Tools

Vector databases

Job description

Drata, at the vanguard of compliance software innovation, is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to drive the quality and effectiveness of our AI systems through rigorous research and evaluation.

You will optimize retrieval strategies, prototype GenAI workflows, and collaborate with AI engineers and software teams to productionize validated approaches, owning the quality metrics and evaluation systems that ensure trustworthy results.