Senior Applied AI Engineer - RAG & GenAI Research

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Health & Wellness benefits

Financial well-being benefits

Job summary

Drata is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to advance AI systems with rigorous research, experimentation, and evaluation. You will optimize retrieval strategies, build evaluation frameworks, and establish scientific foundations for trustworthy AI features across regulatory documents and compliance artifacts.

This research-focused role emphasizes experimentation and rigor over production engineering, collaborating with AI and software engineers to productionize validated approaches while maintaining

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems.
• Strong Python skills and notebook-driven research workflows.
• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable recommendations.
• Bonus: Compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, structured retrieval, tool use, and multi-step workflows
• Prototype GenAI workflows that map and reason over compliance objects
• Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link 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
• 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

Skills

NLP

Information retrieval

Applied ML

Python

Research leadership

Tools

Vector databases

Embedding models

RAG systems

Job description

Drata is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to advance AI systems with rigorous research, experimentation, and evaluation. You will optimize retrieval strategies, build evaluation frameworks, and establish scientific foundations for trustworthy AI features across regulatory documents and compliance artifacts.

This research-focused role emphasizes experimentation and rigor over production engineering, collaborating with AI and software engineers to productionize validated approaches while maintaining