Director of Engineering
Zania· startup· Internet· Oct 12, 2026 · 16d ago
Palo Alto, CA
In office
Full-time
Director
$230K–$280K
10+ years exp
Job description
WHY ZANIA
Every enterprise spends millions of dollars on Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). It's one of the most critical, yet universally painful, parts of running a business. For decades, this industry has been dominated by legacy systems with notoriously low NPS scores, making it totally ripe for disruption.
Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve this massive problem. We are on a rocketship trajectory, creating intelligent agents that automate and augment the most complex risk and compliance workflows. We have found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling our team very quickly. Some reasons to join Zania are:
- Dream Customers: Our customers are the most notable enterprises in the world, including FAANG, Big 4 firms, and a portfolio of top customers.
- Tier 1 Backing: Funded by a leading Tier 1 venture capital fund. Series A led by NEA, with Anthropic and Menlo Ventures. $18M raised to build a generational company.
- World-Class Team: Zania is hiring the best. Our team includes AI and Security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain & Company, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.
- Hyper-Growth: We have seen 10x ARR growth in the last year and are rapidly expanding.
- Competitive Compensation & Equity.
THE ROLE
As Director of Engineering, you will lead the teams building the agents that do real GRC work for the world's most demanding enterprises. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will run day-to-day engineering execution, grow and develop engineers and managers, and stay close enough to the code to make the hard architectural calls.
Our agents review evidence, answer security questionnaires, assess vendors, and map controls across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST, and customers rely on them to be correct and explainable. You will make sure we ship fast without compromising the accuracy, security, and reliability that enterprise GRC demands. You will partner closely with the Head of Engineering, the founders, product, and our GRC experts.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own delivery: Run engineering execution across multiple teams, with weekly ship cycles, clear ownership, and a culture where deploying daily is normal.
- Build and lead the team: Hire, onboard, and develop senior engineers and first-line managers as we scale. Be personally involved in hiring and keep the bar high.
- Ship production-grade agents: Guide the architecture of our LLM orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic workflow systems so they are accurate, explainable, and ready for enterprise scale.
- Raise quality and reliability: Establish practical standards for code review, testing, LLM evaluations, observability, on-call, and incident response.
- Enterprise readiness: Partner with security and GRC leads to meet the security, privacy, and deployment requirements of Fortune 500 customers, and join technical conversations with customers when needed.
- Connect engineering to the field: Work with product and our GRC experts to turn customer feedback and agent failure patterns into prioritized engineering work.
REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS
- Stand up an evaluation framework that measures agent accuracy against practitioner-reviewed answers across real customer assessments, and use it to gate every release.
- Scale the team by hiring 6–8 engineers and a first-line manager in two quarters without lowering the bar.
- Lead the architecture for a single-tenant or VPC deployment option required by a Fortune 500 customer, from design to go-live.
WHAT YOU HAVE
- Builder first, leader second: You are a strong engineer who can read a PR, spot an architectural mistake, and fix it yourself.
- AI-native experience: You have shipped LLM, agentic, or ML systems to production and understand evaluation, context management, and the difference between a demo and a production system.
- Scaling experience: You have grown engineering teams through a Series A/B and developed engineers into leaders.
- Shipping velocity: You measure engineering health by what's in production and know how to remove process that slows teams down.
- Correctness mindset: You have built in a domain where getting it right matters, such as security, compliance, fintech, or health.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a 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, with the ability 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) for your own platform.
- A network of strong engineers in the Bay Area.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Competitive salary + significant equity
- Flexible PTO
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Meals and snacks in the office
- Relocation and immigration support
Zania is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.
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