Senior AI Research Engineer — RAG & GenAI

Rozgoo; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Drata is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to advance the quality of our AI systems through rigorous experimentation and applied research. This role emphasizes research and experimentation over production engineering, owning the science behind how Drata's AI products retrieve, reason, and respond.

You'll collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to turn validated approaches into production-ready systems for our document-heavy compliance platform.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems.
• 2+ years hands-on experience building or contributing to production AI/ML systems.
• Strong foundation in information retrieval: dense/sparse retrieval, embeddings, search relevance.
• Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization.
• Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden datasets, A/B testing, statistical significance.
• Strong Python skills and notebook-driven research workflows.
• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable improvements.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML.
• Prototype GenAI workflows that map and reason over compliance objects (controls risks requirements evidence).
• Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit.
• 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.
• 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 productionize validated approaches.
• Stay current on applied research in RAG, agents, LLM evaluation, and relevance modeling.

Job description

Drata is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to advance the quality of our AI systems through rigorous experimentation and applied research. This role emphasizes research and experimentation over production engineering, owning the science behind how Drata's AI products retrieve, reason, and respond.

You'll collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to turn validated approaches into production-ready systems for our document-heavy compliance platform.