---
title: 'Senior Applied AI Engineer at Zania'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-applied-ai-engineer-zania-palo-alto-03vq9fp7k6w6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-10'
---

# Senior Applied AI Engineer at Zania

- **Company:** Zania
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Compensation:** $180k–$230k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-07-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Zania/8cc549cb-4975-468d-bcf4-4d6ee81e6f2d

## Job description

## Why Zania

Every enterprise spends millions on Governance, Risk, and Compliance. It's one of the most critical — and most painful — parts of running a business. The industry has been dominated by legacy platforms with notoriously low NPS scores for decades. It's completely ripe for disruption. Zania is building agentic AI for GRC to solve this problem. We're building intelligent agents that execute complex risk and compliance workflows with full explainability — not dashboards, not copilots, but agents that do the work. We've found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling fast. Why join:

- Dream Customers: FAANG companies, Big 4 firms, and a portfolio of the world's most notable enterprises.
- Tier 1 Backing: Series A led by NEA, with Anthropic and Menlo Ventures. $18M raised to build a generational company.
- World-Class Team: AI and security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.
- Pioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.
- Hyper-Growth: 10x ARR growth in the last year.
- Competitive Compensation & Equity.

## The role

You will build AI systems designed to outperform the world's leading experts in Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Not research. Not prototypes. Production systems with a fanatical focus on accuracy, explainability, and responsible design. You will own the AI-native products that set a new global standard for GRC. We use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance.

## What you'll do

- Build & fine-tune models. Fine-tune foundation models on proprietary data and implement novel techniques to achieve world-class accuracy on complex GRC tasks.
- Develop AI-native workflows. Build sophisticated, multi-step agentic workflows that automate complex GRC processes — from risk assessment to compliance monitoring to evidence collection.
- Champion responsible AI. Implement and pioneer methods for AI explainability and safety. Our systems must be transparent, auditable, and fair. This is non-negotiable in our domain.
- Drive innovation. Rapidly prototype, evaluate, and integrate state-of-the-art research (agents, RAG, new architectures) into reliable, production-grade features.

Representative projects

- Build an AI agent that analyzes thousands of regulatory documents and internal controls, identifying compliance gaps with higher accuracy than a team of human experts.
- Develop an explainable AI system for risk assessment, allowing auditors and executives to understand and trust the AI's reasoning on high-stakes decisions.
- Build an advanced RAG pipeline over a massive corpus of unstructured company data to produce precise, verifiable assessments against complex compliance requirements.
- Partner with GRC subject matter experts to create ground-truth datasets for tasks like third-party risk evaluation, then fine-tune models that become the industry standard.

## What you have

- 5-8 years in an applied AI or machine learning engineering role.
- Proven product sense. You've shipped reliable, production-scale ML products. You know how to use offline evaluation and online experimentation to achieve high-performance results.
- Hands-on applied AI expertise. Direct experience building with LLMs — fine-tuning, RAG, and agentic systems. Not theoretical. You've put these into production.
- High agency. You take full ownership of outcomes, move with a bias for action, and have a relentless drive for world-class accuracy. You see constraints as design problems, not blockers.
- Strong communication. You can work closely with security and GRC research counterparts and articulate technical tradeoffs clearly.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 4+ years of experience in applied AI, machine learning engineering, or a related technical role
- Demonstrated hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based systems (fine-tuning, RAG, or agentic workflows) in a production environment
- Strong written and verbal communication skills — you will collaborate closely with GRC subject matter experts and must translate technical tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders

## 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

- [Social Media & Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-growth-marketer-zania-palo-alto-0qm6w9nmhbpr) — Palo Alto, CA
- [VP of GRC](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-grc-zania-palo-alto-h5ega3ww3bt9) — Palo Alto, CA
- [VP of Security/GRC Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-security-grc-partnerships-zania-palo-alto-erq0v8tpk22n) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Director of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-zania-palo-alto-m6wcrkbbx1x4) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Director of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-marketing-zania-palo-alto-fkbzbntx2gwj) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Executive Assistant to the CEO](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-the-ceo-zania-palo-alto-xtga5p7hbm17) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Founding Enterprise SDR](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-enterprise-sdr-zania-palo-alto-0z26y4902qfr) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-zania-palo-alto-kvq074rcs7qf) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-lead-zania-palo-alto-9q24b74dj72v) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Staff Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-zania-palo-alto-v750ah1kfymb) — Palo Alto, CA