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Zania is building AI agents for enterprise governance, risk, and compliance teams to execute complex workflows with full explainability. The company raised $18M in Series A funding from NEA, Anthropic, and Menlo Ventures, and was founded by a former founding security engineer at Airbnb and builder of Microsoft Security Copilot.
This Engineering Manager role is a hands-on technical leadership position reporting directly to the CEO. You will own all engineering output—product quality, velocity, reliability, and security—while scaling the team from approximately 5 to 20+ engineers over the next 12 months. This is not a "manage managers" role; instead, it requires a builder-first mindset where you remain deeply technical, capable of reviewing PRs, spotting architectural mistakes, and rewriting code yourself when needed.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning all engineering output and team scaling, with personal involvement in every hire
- Setting and enforcing a shipping culture with weekly demos, continuous deployment, and minimal process overhead
- Partnering directly with the CEO on product direction, prioritization, and customer-facing technical conversations
- Architecting and evolving the platform for enterprise scale, including LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, and compliance automation
- Establishing lightweight but rigorous engineering practices: CI/CD, observability, on-call rotations, and code review standards
Ideal candidates have founder DNA or very early startup experience (employee #1–10), proven ability to scale engineering teams rapidly without lowering hiring bars, and active hands-on experience shipping AI/ML and agentic systems to production. Deep familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, evaluation, context window management, and production-grade AI systems is essential. Background in security, infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, or domains where correctness matters (fintech, security, health, compliance) is a plus. You should be deeply embedded in the Bay Area engineering community and measure engineering health by what's in production, not what's in Jira.
Minimum qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent), 8+ years software engineering experience with at least 3 years in technical leadership or founding engineering roles, demonstrated experience scaling teams from small to 20+, and deep hands-on experience shipping AI/ML systems to production at enterprise scale.
