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Zania is building agentic AI systems for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)—a massive enterprise market currently dominated by legacy systems. The company has achieved exceptional product-market fit with Fortune 500 customers including FAANG and Big 4 firms, raised $18M in Series A funding led by NEA (with backing from Anthropic and Menlo Ventures), and achieved 10x ARR growth in the past year.
As Director of Engineering, you will lead multiple engineering teams building intelligent agents that automate complex GRC workflows. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you own day-to-day engineering execution, grow and develop engineers and managers, and remain close enough to the code to make critical architectural decisions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Running engineering execution across multiple teams with weekly ship cycles and a culture of daily deployments
- Hiring, onboarding, and developing senior engineers and first-line managers as the team scales
- Guiding the architecture of LLM orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic workflow systems to ensure accuracy, explainability, and enterprise-grade reliability
- Establishing standards for code review, testing, LLM evaluations, observability, on-call, and incident response
- Partnering with security and GRC leads to meet Fortune 500 requirements for security, privacy, and deployment
- Translating customer feedback and agent failure patterns into prioritized engineering work
Representative projects include building an evaluation framework to measure agent accuracy against practitioner-reviewed answers, scaling the team by hiring 6–8 engineers and a first-line manager within two quarters, and leading architecture for single-tenant or VPC deployment options for enterprise customers.
The ideal candidate is a strong engineer first and leader second—someone who can review code, spot architectural issues, and fix them. You should have shipped LLM, agentic, or ML systems to production, grown engineering teams through Series A/B, and developed engineers into leaders. You measure engineering health by what's in production and know how to eliminate process bottlenecks. You have a correctness mindset from domains like security, compliance, fintech, or healthcare.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineers and 2+ years leading managers or multiple teams
- Hands-on experience shipping AI/ML, LLM, or agentic systems to production for enterprise customers
- Demonstrated experience hiring and scaling engineering teams at a high-growth, product-led company
- Strong written and verbal communication skills to represent engineering with customers and executives
NICE TO HAVE:
- Background in security, infrastructure, GRC, or enterprise SaaS
- Experience as a founder or early engineering leader (employee #1–20)
- Experience meeting enterprise security requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP)
- Network of strong engineers in the Bay Area
