Manager, AI Engineering - Analytics

Hybrid - San Francisco

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Our Mission & Values:
At Drata, we help companies earn and keep the trust of their users, customers, partners, and prospects. We’re the proof layer that shows great companies deserve the trust they aim to build.

We live our values every day. Built on Trust means consistency is everything. Act with Integrity by always doing the right thing. Being Customer-Obsessed keeps the people we serve at the center of our work. Competitive Fire drives us to push ourselves harder than anyone else. Diversity brings unique perspectives that lead to better solutions. Automation First ensures we save time and money by making efficiency a priority.

Our Culture & Work Style 🚀

At Drata, we’re not just building software - we’re building a mindset. Everything we do springs from:

  • Be a Driver (Owner‑Operator Mentality): Own your work. Improve relentlessly. Deliver results.

  • Move at Drata Speed (Precision & Velocity): Fast decisions. Quick learning. Immediate impact.

  • Stay Mission-Driven (Customer‑Obsessed): Challenge assumptions. Deliver value. Stay hungry.

We pair that high-velocity culture with a thoughtful hybrid model because we believe flexibility and collaboration both matter. That’s why in the Bay we come together in-office Tuesday through Thursday our high‑impact collaboration days where teams align, strategize, and innovate. Mondays and Fridays are flexible, giving you space for focused work, balance, and autonomy.

If you thrive when you’re empowered, energized, and working with smart, mission-driven people, you’ll feel at home here.

Why Join The Drata Team?

The best way to understand the Driver’s Mindset is to see it in action. We’re an award-winning, mission-driven team of 600+ people worldwide, united by a culture that values trust, speed, and continuous growth.

  • See the Speed: Watch our CEO, Adam Markowitz, discuss the hyper-growth journey, from $0 to $100M ARR in just four years

  • Hear the Voice of the Team: Explore our "Life at Drata" page for employee testimonials on our collaborative and the growth opportunities available.

  • Experience the Impact: See why we are consistently recognized on Fortune's Best Workplaces lists.

  • Connect with Us on Socials: LinkedIn - follow us for company updates, employee stories, and career news.

at Drata. This team is responsible for the in-product analytics and reporting experience our customers rely on to understand their compliance posture, surface insights from their Drata environment, and turn data into action.

This is a player-coach role. You will be writing code, designing systems, and shipping production AI features alongside a tight group of engineers, while also setting direction, unblocking the team, and growing into the leadership role. It is a great fit for a strong AI engineer who is ready to take their first formal step into management without giving up the keyboard.

The most important thing you bring is a real AI engineering background. You have shipped agents to production, you know what evals are and have built them, and you have strong data fundamentals to back it up.

What you'll do:

Build Alongside the Team

  • Stay deeply hands-on by writing code, designing systems, and reviewing PRs

  • Own critical paths and pair with engineers on the hardest parts of the product

  • Keep close to the codebase and the customer experience even as the team grows

  • Set the bar for engineering quality through your own work

Lead a Small Team

  • Lead a small, focused team of engineers and grow it thoughtfully over time

  • Set clear goals, run good 1:1s, and create an environment where engineers do their best work

  • Give direct, useful feedback and help engineers grow in their careers

  • Invest in the basics of management: hiring, performance, career growth, and team health

  • Partner with leadership to grow into the formal management craft

Own the AI and Data Direction

  • Set the technical direction for AI-driven analytics and the data foundation underneath it

  • Make pragmatic decisions across the stack, from data modeling to agent design

  • Define multi-tenant data access patterns that safely serve customer-scoped data at scale

  • Make sound build, buy, and adopt decisions for the team's tooling

  • Stay current on developments in applied AI and bring relevant ideas back to the team

Build Natural Language Data Experiences

  • Help shape and build features that let users ask questions of their data in natural language

  • Ground AI responses in real data, handle ambiguity, and surface uncertainty appropriately

  • Keep AI-driven experiences fast, accurate, and trustworthy

  • Iterate quickly with design partners to find what works in production

Make Evals a First-Class Practice

  • Build the evals, telemetry, and offline/online test loops the team relies on

  • Establish eval-driven development as the default workflow

  • Define what "good" means for each AI feature and measure it rigorously

  • Use eval results to guide model, prompt, and architecture decisions

Ship and Learn

  • Drive end-to-end delivery from spec to GA

  • Partner with Product on scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs

  • Ship iteratively to design partners, instrument adoption, and learn from real usage

  • Establish the metrics that prove the experience is delivering value

What you'll bring:

AI Engineering

  • Real AI engineering background with at least one agent or LLM-powered system shipped to production end-to-end

  • Working knowledge of prompts, tool use, retrieval, and structured outputs

  • Understanding of latency, cost, and quality tradeoffs in LLM-based systems

  • Familiarity with the failure modes of AI features in the real world

Evals

  • Hands-on experience designing and building evals for AI systems

  • Comfort with offline benchmarks, regression testing for non-deterministic systems, and online feedback loops

  • Ability to articulate how to evaluate an agent before, during, and after launch

  • Bias toward measurable quality over vibes

Data Fundamentals

  • Strong SQL skills and comfort with modern data warehouses

  • Experience with data modeling and the plumbing that powers analytics

  • Ability to reason about query performance, data contracts, and multi-tenant access patterns

  • Comfort working close to the data, not just on top of it

Hands-On and Pragmatic

  • Happy writing code and intend to keep doing it

  • Pragmatic about technology choices and careful about complexity

  • Bias toward shipping and learning over over-engineering

  • Comfortable working across the full stack on a small team

Ready to Lead

  • Track record of leading projects, mentoring engineers, and driving technical direction

  • Strong written and verbal communication

  • Direct, kind feedback style and a desire to invest in growing a team

  • Clear pull toward leadership, even without prior formal management experience

Requirements:

  • 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 focused on AI/ML or applied AI work (agents, LLMs, evals, or similar)

  • At least one agent or LLM-powered system deployed to production that you owned end-to-end

  • Hands-on experience building and using evals to measure and improve AI quality

  • Solid data engineering or analytics engineering experience, including SQL, modeling, and modern data warehouses

  • Track record of shipping production software on small teams and operating across the full stack

  • Experience as a tech lead, project lead, or strong mentor, with a desire to grow into formal management

  • Strong written and verbal communication

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience

Bonus Qualifications

  • Prior experience working on a customer-facing data product, embedded analytics, BI tooling, or a natural language interface over structured data (text-to-SQL, conversational analytics, or similar)

  • Experience with semantic modeling layers or modern BI infrastructure

  • Experience integrating AI agents with structured data sources

  • Background in compliance, security, GRC, or other regulated SaaS verticals

  • Prior tech lead or team lead experience

  • Previous experience at high-growth SaaS companies

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.

  • 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.

This role will receive a competitive base salary, benefits, and stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for this role is: $197,800 - $267,600.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s leveling and compensation–including a candidate’s professional background and experience. These ranges may be modified in the future and final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.

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