Staff Software Engineer, Evidence & Frameworks

Drata; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Health premium coverage

401(k) plan

Job summary

Drata seeks a Staff Software Engineer in San Francisco to lead architectural direction for evidence collection and the framework/controls model. You will own cross-team initiatives, build scalable ingest pipelines, and guide AI-enabled enhancements with strong emphasis on reliability and security.

Youll mentor engineers, review architectures for quality and security, and partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap. The role demands hands-on involvement while raising bar for the team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including production systems and customer-facing products.
• Strong track record leading multiple teams and cross-team initiatives.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, and integration-heavy platforms.
• Solid backend fundamentals: API design, relational databases, testing, observability, and CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for evidence collection and the framework/controls data model with product and engineering leadership.
• Design and build scalable, reliable systems ingesting evidence across many integrations and tenants.
• Lead cross-team projects (e.g., re-architecting pipelines, introducing new frameworks) for faster compliance workflows.
• Integrate AI/agentic capabilities into workflows with guardrails for accuracy and auditability.
• Review system health and root-cause issues to drive roadmap improvements.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and coaching; communicate decisions clearly.

Skills

Software architecture

Cross-team leadership

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

API design

Relational databases

Testing

Observability

CI/CD

Clear communication

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

NestJS

React

AWS

TypeORM

Jest

Redis

Elasticsearch

Job description

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.

Job Summary:

Evidence & Frameworks is the engine behind Drata's promise of continuous compliance. Our teams build the systems that collect evidence from hundreds of integrations, map it to controls across dozens of frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, NIST, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, AI standards and more), and keep thousands of customers audit-ready every day.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll be the technical leader across these teams. You'll set architectural direction for evidence collection and the framework and controls model, take on the hardest cross-team problems around scale, reliability and data correctness, and help us bring AI agents into these workflows safely. You'll stay hands-on while raising the bar for the engineers around you.

What you'll do:

• Own the technical direction for evidence collection and the framework/controls data model, partnering with Product and Engineering leadership to shape the roadmap
• Design and build scalable, reliable systems that ingest and process evidence across many integrations and tenants
• Lead cross-team projects that are too big for one team, such as re-architecting a pipeline, introducing new frameworks for adding compliance standards faster, or migrating shared functionality
• Bring AI and agentic capabilities into evidence and framework workflows with the right guardrails for accuracy, auditability and customer trust
• Read your teams' system health (SLOs, errors, latency, deploy and change-failure signals), chase root causes, and turn recurring issues into roadmap work
• Review architecture and code to ensure quality, scalability and security, while empowering teams to own implementation and delivery
• Troubleshoot escalated performance and data-integrity issues through to resolution
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and informal coaching, and communicate technical decisions clearly to engineers, product partners and leadership

What you'll bring:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems, including customer-facing products you supported in production
• A track record of technical leadership across multiple teams: setting direction, driving alignment, and delivering complex cross-team initiatives
• Deep experience with distributed systems, data pipelines or integration-heavy platforms at meaningful scale
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, relational databases and data modeling, testing, observability, and CI/CD
• Production experience with TypeScript/Node.js (our stack is TypeScript, NestJS and React). Strong engineers from other languages who can ramp quickly on TypeScript are encouraged to apply
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS preferred) and infrastructure as code
• Practical, everyday use of AI-assisted development tools, and good judgment about where AI belongs in a product
• Clear written and verbal communication

Nice to have:

• Experience in security, compliance, GRC or audit products
• Experience building LLM-powered features or agentic workflows in production
• Familiarity with NestJS, TypeORM, Jest, Redis and Elasticsearch
• Experience in a startup or growth-stage environment

What success looks like:

• First 90 days: you understand the evidence and frameworks architecture and its pain points, and you've published a technical direction your teams and product partners agree on
• 6 months: you're leading at least one cross-team initiative with measurable impact on reliability, scale or speed of delivery
• 12 months: the platform is measurably more reliable and faster to extend, and the engineers around you are stronger for having worked with you

How we support you:

At Drata, our people are our strongest advantage—and we prove it with support that exceeds industry standards. Our total rewards package is designed to power your well-being, accelerate your growth, and keep your work-life balance thriving.

Explore how we invest in your Life at Drata https://drata.com/about/life-at-drata?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

• 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.
• Health & Wellness: Up to 100% employer-paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents, along with comprehensive wellness benefits and healthcare concierge services designed to support your needs beyond traditional insurance.
• Financial Well-being: A comprehensive suite of financial benefits, including a 401(k) plan, company-paid life and disability insurance, tax-advantaged spending accounts, and a range of discounted voluntary offerings to help you customize and strengthen your overall financial position.
• 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. Employees also receive access to Kindbody fertility and family-building benefits and dedicated leave specialists who help guide you through the entire process.
• Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development, empowering you to invest in your continued growth. You’ll also have access to a wide range of internal learning opportunities, ensuring you can build new skills, deepen your expertise, and advance your career with confidence.
• Time Off & Flexibility: We believe that to do your best work, you should get the time you need for rest, rejuvenation and recovery. Drata offers a flexible vacation policy, paid holidays, and other perks to recharge.

The expected base salary range for this role is between $165,000 - $270,000 and is listed to provide transparency. Actual base pay will vary based on multiple factors — market location, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and overall alignment to the role. Candidates shouldn't expect automatic placement at any particular point within the range. Offer amounts are determined by the qualifications each candidate brings to the position. Total compensation may also include equity designed to provide meaningful ownership in the company, as well as health and wellbeing benefits.