---
title: 'Director of Marketing at Zania'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-marketing-zania-palo-alto-txw3h771kr9y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Director of Marketing at Zania

- **Company:** Zania
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Compensation:** $190k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zania/1346f0e2-8697-491e-8815-6d8c47079094

## 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 Marketing, you will own how the world's most demanding security and risk leaders discover, understand, and choose Zania. This is a hands-on, player-coach role: you will set the strategy and personally build the engine, from category narrative and positioning to pipeline and launches. GRC is a category defined by legacy incumbents and generic "compliance automation" messaging. Your job is to make it unmistakable that agentic AI is the new way GRC work gets done, and that Zania is the company leading it. You will partner directly with the founders and the sales team, manage our Growth & Demand Gen and design talent, and be accountable for pipeline and revenue, not activity.

## What You'll Do

- Own the category narrative: Define Zania's positioning and messaging for agentic GRC across security questionnaires, third-party risk, audits, and compliance programs, and make it land with CISOs, Chief Risk Officers, and Heads of GRC.
- Build the pipeline engine: Set the marketing plan and targets, and own marketing-sourced and influenced pipeline for enterprise and Fortune 500 accounts, in close partnership with sales and the founders.
- Product marketing and launches: Turn new agent capabilities into crisp launches, customer stories, competitive positioning, and sales enablement that help AEs win against legacy GRC platforms.
- Executive and community programs: Build high-signal programs for senior security and risk buyers: CISO dinners, roundtables, analyst relations, and a presence at RSA, Black Hat, Gartner Security & Risk, and ISACA events.
- Build and lead the team: Hire and develop a small, high-output team (growth, content, design) and the right agency and freelance partners. Set the operating cadence and the metrics.
- Instrument the funnel: Own the marketing stack and reporting so we always know what's working, what CAC looks like by channel, and where to place the next dollar.

Representative Projects

- Lead the launch of a new Zania agent, from positioning and messaging through a CISO-facing campaign, analyst briefings, and sales enablement, and measure the pipeline it creates within 60 days.
- Rebuild Zania's website and core narrative to clearly separate agentic GRC from "compliance automation," and test it with target buyers before launch.
- Design and run an executive event series for Fortune 500 CISOs and risk leaders in the Bay Area and New York that turns into qualified pipeline.

## What You Have

- Enterprise B2B depth: You have led marketing at a company that sells to security, risk, or IT executives, and you understand how long, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals are actually won.
- Narrative and taste: You can write a positioning doc, a homepage, and a CISO-facing email yourself, and you know the difference between messaging that earns attention and messaging that is noise.
- Revenue orientation: You measure marketing by pipeline and ARR, and you know your way around funnel math, attribution, and CAC.
- Player-coach leadership: You have hired and led a small marketing team and still ship work yourself.
- Startup speed: You thrive with lean budgets, fast iteration, and direct access to the founders.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of B2B marketing experience, including 3+ years leading a marketing function or team at a high-growth SaaS company.
- Experience marketing to enterprise security, risk, compliance, or IT buyers (cybersecurity, GRC, or adjacent enterprise infrastructure).
- Proven track record of building marketing programs that generated measurable enterprise pipeline and revenue.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present to executive audiences.

## Nice to Have

- Experience at a cybersecurity or GRC company from early stage through Series B/C.
- Experience positioning an AI-native product against established incumbents.
- Existing relationships with security analysts, media, or CISO communities.
- Familiarity with HubSpot, Salesforce, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and ABM platforms.

## 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.

## About Zania

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zania provides an autonomous AI agent platform that executes Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) work, including controls testing, risk assessments, audits, and security questionnaires.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Shruti Gupta

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) / Cybersecurity
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (Fortune 500, Big Four audit & advisory firms, CISOs, Heads of GRC, TPRM leaders)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To automate and execute complex GRC work with provable accuracy, replacing manual processes with autonomous AI agents.

## Products & Services
- **Autonomous Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)**: AI agents that handle vendor risk tiering, evidence collection, validation, follow-ups, and continuous monitoring end-to-end.
- **First-Party Risk**: AI-driven qualitative and quantitative risk evaluations based on a company's unique systems, controls, and data.
- **Continuous Compliance**: Agents that continuously collect evidence, identify gaps against any framework (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, GDPR, etc.), and assist with remediation.
- **Controls Testing**: Autonomous testing of 100% of controls for both design and operating effectiveness, with actionable recommendations.
- **Security Questionnaires**: AI that leverages a company's security context to answer incoming vendor questionnaires with precision in minutes.
- **Self-Governing Policies**: Policies that update themselves to stay in sync with a company's compliance and tech stack.
- **Agent-Driven Risk Intelligence**: Continuous monitoring of vendors using data from integrations, incidents, supply chain, threat intel, breach history, and company profiles.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $18.0M (Series A, led by NEA, announced October 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: NEA (lead), Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Palm Drive Capital, AWS ISV Accelerate Program. Advisors include Mike Curtis (Ex-Head of Eng, Airbnb), Anand Deshpande (Founder & Chairman, Persistent Systems), and George Kurtz (Founder & CEO, Crowdstrike).
- **Growth Signals**: Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and Big Four audit & advisory firms. Launched "Autonomous TPRM" in February 2026. Headcount grew 17.6% YoY. Active job postings grew 125% YoY. LinkedIn follower count grew 85.7% yearly.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Purpose-built AI agents** for GRC, not a general-purpose LLM wrapper — trained on domain-specific GRC workflows.
- **Provable accuracy and explainability**: Features like confidence scores, visible reasoning, source references, and deep research make outputs audit-ready.
- **Enterprise-grade security**: SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, private models with no training on customer data, and a reported hallucination rate of <0.01%.
- **End-to-end workflow automation**: Agents handle the entire GRC process from evidence collection to remediation, not just individual tasks.
- **Founder-led domain expertise**: CEO Shruti Gupta previously led AI at Microsoft and held founding security/CISO roles at Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex.

## Strategic Focus
- **Autonomous execution**: Shifting GRC from human-led processes with AI assistance to agent-led execution with human oversight.
- **Expanding TPRM capabilities**: Launched "Autonomous TPRM" in February 2026 to fully automate vendor risk management.
- **Continuous compliance**: Moving from point-in-time audits to 24/7 continuous monitoring and evidence collection.
- **Enterprise scale**: Targeting deeper penetration into Fortune 500 and Big Four firms.

## Why Work Here
- **Rocketship growth**: Early-stage, well-funded startup ($18M Series A) with strong investor backing from top-tier VCs (NEA, Menlo Ventures) and strategic partners (Anthropic).
- **Compelling mission**: Opportunity to build the future of AI-driven GRC, a massive market with high demand.
- **Compensation**: Top-of-market pay with meaningful equity ownership.
- **Perks**: Flexible PTO, free catered meals and snacks, relocation and immigration support.
- **Work environment**: In-office presence in Palo Alto, CA, with a presence in India. The team is small (~11 employees) and technical (25% of staff in technical roles).
- **Leadership**: Founded by Shruti Gupta, a former AI leader at Microsoft and founding security/CISO at Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex. Backed by world-class advisors from Crowdstrike, Airbnb, and Persistent Systems.
- **Growth trajectory**: Rapidly growing with 9 active job postings, 125% YoY increase in job postings, and strong revenue growth signals.

## Sources
1. [zania.ai](https://zania.ai/)
2. [zania.ai/careers](https://zania.ai/careers)
3. [zania.ai/about-us](https://zania.ai/about-us)
4. [linkedin.com/company/zaniaai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zaniaai)
5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/zania)

## Other roles at Zania

- [Partnership Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/partnership-manager-zania-palo-alto-y284r635m228) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Director of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-zania-palo-alto-31v8c50rhpjr) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Executive Assistant to the CEO](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-the-ceo-zania-palo-alto-hvm71441b8sx) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Founding Enterprise SDR](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-enterprise-sdr-zania-palo-alto-avagb6jpshwp) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-zania-palo-alto-8n4xxwd00hej) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-lead-zania-palo-alto-rmnzg5wgajdv) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Staff Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-zania-palo-alto-exkya0ggm5jz) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-zania-palo-alto-bpt37pjsyjye) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Ex Founder](https://feeny.ai/job/ex-founder-zania-palo-alto-0y2683te77vr) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior GRC Lead: Risk & Compliance](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-grc-lead-risk-compliance-zania-palo-alto-r7cjfd25ady5) — Palo Alto, CA