Drata

Engineering

SeniorAppliedResearchEngineer

$192–260k San Francisco, California, United States FULL TIME Remote Friendly
The Brief

“Senior Applied Research Engineer at Drata. Skills: Applied research, Information retrieval, RAG systems, Evaluation methodology. Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies. Prototype GenAI workflows”

Industry & Context.

Engineering
Problems you'll solve

Debug failure modes; Build error taxonomies

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

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

Nice to Have

Experience with compliance, legal, or document-heavy domains, Publications or contributions in IR, NLP, or RAG evaluation

What You'll Do.

Design and evaluate information access + reasoning strategies

Prototype GenAI workflows

Explore ML + probabilistic approaches

Build and maintain evaluation frameworks

Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems

Run experiments to validate hypotheses

Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers

Stay current on applied research

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers; Hand off validated approaches for productionization; Communicating research findings to engineering teams

Communication Scope

Communicating research findings

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