Principal AI Architect

Hop • San Francisco, CA

10h • Hybrid

About The Position

Draup is a Series A-funded agentic AI company building the intelligence layer for how global enterprises make workforce and go-to-market decisions. We work with 250+ enterprise clients — including 5 of the Fortune 10 — processing 1B+ job descriptions, 850M+ professional profiles, and signals from 100+ labor databases. We are now building our Silicon Valley engineering team — a small, senior group focused on next-generation AI research and product.

Requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field. PhD or equivalent research depth preferred.
• 5+ years in AI/ML engineering with at least 2 years in a principal engineer or lead architect role.
• Demonstrated history of building original AI systems that became products — not implementations of existing patterns.
• Deep expertise across: LLM training and fine-tuning, agentic system design, knowledge graph construction, large-scale data modeling.
• Comfort operating in greenfield conditions: high ambiguity, high ownership.
• Must be authorized to work in the US without current or future employer sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Patents, published research, or shipped products with clear proprietary differentiation are strong signals.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the architectural vision for next-generation AI systems: novel agent architectures, reasoning systems, and proprietary model development.
• Prototype and evaluate breakthrough AI capabilities — predictive modeling, autonomous signal synthesis, multi-modal intelligence — that create defensible IP.
• Set the technical foundations: data architecture, model serving, agent orchestration, and inference infrastructure for a multi-year product horizon.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI paradigms (multi-agent reasoning, RLHF, retrieval-augmented fine-tuning) before they are mainstream.
• Establish engineering standards, architecture review processes, and IP documentation practices for the team.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees