Senior Applied Research Engineer 2

Drata is a company focused on building trust through its compliance platform, and they are seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to enhance the quality and effectiveness of their AI systems. This role involves rigorous experimentation and applied research, working closely with AI and Software Engineers to develop production-ready systems for information retrieval and reasoning.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML: chunking, embedding models, hybrid search, metadata filtering, semantic routing
• Prototype GenAI workflows (including agentic systems) that map and reason over compliance objects (controls ↔ risks ↔ requirements ↔ evidence)
• Explore ML + probabilistic approaches where GenAI is not the best fit: classifiers, ranking models, graph/link prediction, calibration, and structured 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, custom scoring functions
• 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