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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.
As Head of Engineering, you will own engineering end-to-end: architecture decisions, hiring, shipping cadence, and team culture. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a "manage managers" position. You will scale the team from approximately 5 to 20+ engineers over the next 12 months while personally ensuring the product is world-class.
Key responsibilities include owning all engineering output (product quality, velocity, reliability, security), building the engineering team from current size to 15–20 in 12 months with personal involvement in every hire, setting and enforcing a shipping culture with weekly demos and continuous deployment, partnering directly with the CEO on product direction and prioritization, architecting and evolving the platform for enterprise scale (LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, compliance automation), and establishing lightweight but real engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, on-call, code review standards).
The ideal candidate is a builder first and manager second—someone who was the strongest engineer on any team they've been part of and chose management because they realized leadership was the highest-leverage way to multiply themselves. You should have founder DNA with prior experience as a technical founder or very early engineering leader (employee #1–10) at a startup that shipped real product under real constraints. You must have a proven ability to scale a team from small to 20+, having hired 10–20 engineers in a compressed timeline without lowering the bar, ideally with a personal network of strong engineers in the Bay Area.
An AI-native mindset is essential—not just interest in AI, but actively building with LLMs, agents, tool-use, and orchestration frameworks today. You should understand prompt engineering, evaluation, context window management, and the difference between demo-ware and production-grade AI systems. Experience with agentic architectures is strongly preferred. Shipping velocity should be a core value; you measure engineering health by what's in production, not what's in Jira, and you set aggressive timelines and hold the team to them.
Minimum qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience), 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or founding engineering role at a product-led company, demonstrated experience scaling an engineering team from small to 20+ engineers with proven ability to hire, develop, and retain senior technical talent, deep hands-on experience shipping AI/ML or agentic systems to production at enterprise scale, and strong written and verbal communication skills. Background in security, infrastructure, or enterprise SaaS is a plus, as is experience in domains where correctness matters (fintech, security, health, compliance).
Reports directly to CEO. Compensation includes significant equity plus competitive cash, structured to attract a builder, not a caretaker.
