--- title: 'AI Team Lead at Zafran Security' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-team-lead-zafran-security-tel-aviv-2g4ev1trg3zj' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # AI Team Lead at Zafran Security - **Company:** Zafran Security - **Location:** Tel Aviv, Israel - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zafran-security/ea6842b5-eae2-4835-8c51-dc3e59555bef ## Job description Zafran is building the next generation of vulnerability and risk management. We bring together complex security data and turn it into clear investigation, prioritization, and action. We’re creating a new AI team to build the shared infrastructure, tools, and standards that enable teams across R&D to develop reliable AI-powered capabilities. The team will also own and deliver core AI experiences used across Zafran’s platform and organization. We’re looking for an experienced AI Team Lead to build and lead this team — someone who combines strong engineering leadership with hands-on experience building production AI systems and platforms. About Zafran: Our Mission: To stop the exploitation of vulnerabilities, everywhere. What makes us different: Zafran de-risks 90% of critical vulnerabilities overnight across your hybrid environment and utilizes Agentic Capabilities and your existing security tools to rapidly mitigate and remediate the 10% most likely to be exploited. We have a deep belief that cybersecurity defence should move as fast as attackers do, and we provide an agentic response to agentic attacks. Who’s behind us: Zafran is a Post C, hyper growing start-up, backed by Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures. We’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry, scaling to meet demand from the world’s most advanced, security-obsessed organizations. We’re serious about our mission- so expect work that matters, teammates who challenge and inspire you, and plenty of fun along the way! ## WHAT YOU’LL DO - Build and lead Zafran’s AI dedicated team from the ground up. - Define, implement and maintain the company-wide AI platform, infrastructure, and developer tools. - Enable R&D teams to build, test, deploy, and monitor AI-powered capabilities independently. - Lead the design and delivery of shared AI experiences and services across the company. - Establish standards for quality, reliability, security, observability, and cost management. - Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, Security Research, and other teams to identify high-impact opportunities and turn them into scalable solutions. - Stay hands-on with architecture, implementation, production issues, and technical decisions. - Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar for AI development across R&D. ## REQUIREMENTS: - Experience leading engineers in an AI, infrastructure, or backend team. - Strong hands-on software engineering and system design skills. - Production experience building AI-powered applications or infrastructure around large language models. - Experience with model APIs, retrieval, evaluation, prompt and context management, tool use, and agentic workflows. - Ability to design systems that are reliable, scalable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient. - Strong product thinking and the ability to turn broad AI opportunities into practical capabilities. - Excellent cross-team collaboration and communication skills. - Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment where the team and technical foundations are still being shaped. ## NICE TO HAVE - Experience building internal developer infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams. - Experience with model evaluation, safety controls, governance, or production monitoring. - Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS systems. - Background in cybersecurity or security-data products. - Experience building a new team or introducing AI practices across an engineering organization. ## WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS AI will become a shared capability across Zafran’s products and engineering organization. This team will create the foundation that helps every R&D team build AI features faster and more safely, while also owning strategic AI experiences for the company. This is an opportunity to shape Zafran’s AI architecture, engineering standards, and team from the ground up. ## About Zafran Security ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Zafran Security provides an AI-native Threat Exposure Management platform that unifies vulnerability data, assesses exploitability in context, and automates mitigation and remediation using existing security controls. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series C) - **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States [linkedin.com] - **Founded**: 2023 (inferred from initial seed funding in early 2024) [linkedin.com] - **Founders**: Sanaz Yashar (CEO) and Ben Seri (CTO) [zafran.io/about] ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity (vulnerability / exposure management) - **Target customers**: Enterprise security teams (Fortune 500 and high-growth companies) [zafran.io/platform] - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Proactively stop the exploitation of vulnerabilities, everywhere.” [zafran.io/about] ## Products & Services - **Zafran Threat Exposure Management Platform** (SaaS / agentic): End-to-end platform that unifies findings across cloud, on-prem, and AppSec; assesses risk using runtime presence, reachability, exploitability, asset criticality, and existing controls; enables proactive exposure hunting; provides mitigation guidance that leverages compensating controls; and automates remediation via RemOps (generative AI‑powered remediation operations). [zafran.io/platform] - **Zafran Detector** (released Aug 2025): Continuous vulnerability discovery tool that supplements existing scanners. [linkedin.com] - **Agentic Remediation™**: AI agents that research CVE conditions, validate exploitability on live assets, generate remediation scripts, and maintain human oversight with approval workflows. [zafran.io/platform] ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $105.5M as of December 2025. Breakdown: Seed $5.5M (Mar 2024), Series B $40M (Sep 2024, led by Sequoia Capital and Cyberstarts), Series C $60M (Dec 2025, led by Menlo Ventures). [linkedin.com] - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sequoia Capital (Doug Leone on board), Cyberstarts (Lior Simon on board), Menlo Ventures (Rama Sekhar on board), Amex Ventures (strategic investor in 2026). Included in Microsoft for Startups Pegasus Program. [zafran.io/about, linkedin.com] - **Growth Signals**: 132 employees (51% YoY growth, +58 people); 30 open positions as of mid‑2026; monthly job postings up 57.9% YoY; expansion across US, Israel, Germany, and UK. [linkedin.com] ## Competitive Advantages - **AI-native, context-aware analysis**: Applies each customer’s unique asset criticality, runtime presence, and existing control stack to determine which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable – eliminating up to 90% of critical false positives. [zafran.io/platform] - **Leverages existing defenses**: Rather than demanding new agents or patch‑only fixes, Zafran maps exposures to compensating controls and provides step‑by‑step mitigation guidance, shrinking exposure windows before patching begins. [zafran.io/platform] - **Closed‑loop automation**: Agentic Remediation and RemOps reduce manual triage, consolidate overlapping CVEs into single remediation actions, and route work automatically via ticketing integrations. [zafran.io/platform] - **Founding team with breach‑response experience**: Co‑founders directly investigated breaches resulting from known vulnerabilities, giving the product a practitioner‑driven design. [zafran.io/about] ## Strategic Focus - **Scale the platform’s adoption among large enterprises** (Fortune 500) and expand the partner ecosystem. - **Continue product innovation** – recent launches include the Zafran Detector and RemOps; ongoing development of agentic capabilities. - **Global talent acquisition** – aggressive hiring across engineering, sales, and customer success to support 50%+ headcount growth. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Founded by cybersecurity practitioners who understand the pain of manual vulnerability management. Emphasis on “clarity and speed” and building solutions that make defenders more effective. [zafran.io/about] - **Work model**: Hybrid – offices in New York, Tel Aviv (Israel), and presence in Germany and the UK. Remote options for certain roles (e.g., Channel Manager listed as Remote – CST). [linkedin.com, zafran.io/careers] - **Notable perks / engineering culture**: High ratio of technical staff (40% of known department breakdown); talent drawn from top security companies (Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Armis, Microsoft). The company values “customer” focus and “building” as core principles. [linkedin.com] - **Growth opportunity**: Joining at a Series C stage with proven product‑market fit and a clear path to scale – an ideal time for impact. ## Sources 1. [zafran.io](https://www.zafran.io/) 2. [zafran.io/about](https://www.zafran.io/about) 3. [zafran.io/platform](https://www.zafran.io/platform) 4. [zafran.io/careers](https://www.zafran.io/careers) 5. 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