---
title: 'Head of Engineering at Zania'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-zania-palo-alto-bpt37pjsyjye'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Head of Engineering at Zania

- **Company:** Zania
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zania/872fd568-c864-4c3f-826e-564c213dcc2a

## Job description

## About Zania

Zania is building AI agents for enterprise governance, risk, and compliance teams to execute complex workflows with full explainability. Series A, $18M raised from NEA, Anthropic, and Menlo Ventures. Founded by a former founding security engineer at Airbnb and builder of Microsoft Security Copilot. We're not building another dashboard — we're replacing entire workflows with agents that do the work.

## Why this role exists

We need a Head of Engineering who will own engineering end-to-end: architecture decisions, hiring, shipping cadence, and team culture. This is not a "manage managers" role. This is a hands-on technical leader who scales the team from ~5 to 20+ engineers in the next 12 months while personally ensuring the product is world-class.

## What we're looking for — non-negotiables

1. Builder first, manager second. This person was (or could be) the strongest engineer on any team they've been part of. They chose management not because they plateaued technically, but because they were a founder or realized leadership was the highest-leverage way to multiply themselves. They can read a PR, spot an architectural mistake, and rewrite it themselves if needed.
2. Founder DNA. Prior experience as a technical founder or very early engineering leader (employee #1–10) at a startup that shipped real product under real constraints. They know what it means to make decisions with incomplete information, cut scope ruthlessly, and hold a team accountable to weekly ship cycles — not quarterly roadmaps.
3. Proven ability to scale a team from small to 20+. They've hired 10–20 engineers in a compressed timeline without lowering the bar. They have a system for how to source, close, and onboard fast. Ideally they have a personal network of strong engineers in the Bay Area they'd bring with them or recruit from.
4. AI-native mindset. Not "interested in AI" — actively building with LLMs, agents, tool-use, and orchestration frameworks today. They 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.
5. Shipping velocity as a core value. They measure engineering health by what's in production, not what's in Jira. They set aggressive timelines and hold the team to them. They know how to unblock engineers, kill unnecessary process, and create a culture where deploying daily is normal.
6. Deep, not wide. We do not want a "mezzanine" leader — someone who operates through layers, delegates everything, and speaks in frameworks. This person goes deep on specific systems, debugs production issues at 2am, and explains architecture tradeoffs to a customer on a sales call.

## What you'll do

- Own all engineering output: product quality, velocity, reliability, and security.
- Build the engineering team from current size to 15–20 in 12 months. Personally involved in every hire.
- Set and enforce a shipping culture — weekly demos, continuous deployment, minimal process overhead.
- Partner directly with the CEO on product direction, prioritization, and customer-facing technical conversations.
- Architect and evolve the platform (LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, compliance automation) for enterprise scale.
- Establish lightweight but real engineering practices: CI/CD, observability, on-call, code review standards.

Signals we look for

- Founded or co-founded a technical startup (even if it didn't work out).
- Scaled an eng team through a Series A/B at a product-led company.
- Has shipped AI/ML products to production — not research, not POCs.
- Deep in the Bay Area engineering community — knows who to call.
- Background in security, infrastructure, or enterprise SaaS is a plus.
- Has operated in a domain where correctness matters (fintech, security, health, compliance).

## Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a 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 a 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
- Strong written and verbal communication skills — you will partner directly with the CEO and represent engineering in customer-facing technical conversations

Comp Significant equity + competitive cash — structured to attract a builder, not a caretaker. Reports directly to CEO. How to apply Email careers@zania.ai or apply through our careers page.

## 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)

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- [Graphics Designer | Framer & Video Editing](https://feeny.ai/job/graphics-designer-framer-video-editing-zania-india-arcz8dsand5b) — India
- [Eng Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/eng-manager-zania-palo-alto-8n4xxwd00hej) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth & Demand Generation](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-demand-generation-zania-palo-alto-rmnzg5wgajdv) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-zania-palo-alto-exkya0ggm5jz) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Ex Founder](https://feeny.ai/job/ex-founder-zania-palo-alto-0y2683te77vr) — Palo Alto, CA
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