---
title: 'Software Engineer at Zania'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-zania-palo-alto-exkya0ggm5jz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Software Engineer at Zania

- **Company:** Zania
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Compensation:** $100k–$200k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zania/b26b95f4-1f56-4068-a157-1cdbb3276c18

## Job description

## FOUNDING SOFTWARE ENGINEER (MID–SENIOR LEVEL)

## 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, giving us the resources 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.
- Pioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building the next generation of agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.
- Hyper-Growth: We have seen 10x ARR growth in the last year and are rapidly expanding.
- Competitive Compensation & Equity.

The Role:

As a Software Engineer, you will be a core member of our engineering team, building the backend systems that power both our core product and our agentic AI platform. This is a backend-focused role for engineers who thrive on solving challenges at a massive scale; full-stack experience is a strong plus. You will design, build, and deploy the critical infrastructure and services that handle everything from petabyte-scale data retrieval to running thousand-step AI agents. This is a unique opportunity to tackle some of the most demanding problems in computing today and build systems with government-level security and reliability.

What You'll Do:

- Engineer Core Product Features: Take ownership of building and delivering scalable, secure backend services that directly power our user-facing product.
- Build Petabyte-Scale AI Pipelines: Design and implement robust systems for retrieval over petabyte-scale document troves and engineer pipelines for large-scale data collection.
- Develop Advanced Agentic Systems: Build the backend infrastructure for complex, 1000-step planning agents that help companies with critical processes, and create organizational-level interfaces for human-AI collaboration.
- Contribute to the architecture and management of our cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability and performance.
- Engineer systems with the highest standards of security and reliability to protect the world's most sensitive data.

What We're Looking For:

- Experience: 4-8 years of professional software engineering experience (not intended for recent graduates).
- Proven Technical Impact: A demonstrated track record of delivering complex, high-quality backend systems.
- Product Building Experience: You have a history of building and launching robust products or platforms, ideally in a hyper-growth or 0-to-1 startup environment.
- Deep Technical Expertise: You are a hands-on, highly technical backend engineer with proficiency in:
- Python: For building robust backend services and AI pipelines.
- Large-Scale Systems: Experience with distributed systems, large-scale data processing (e.g., Spark), and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP).
- TypeScript and React: Experience is a plus for contributing across the stack but is not required.
- Ownership and Drive: You take full ownership of your projects, demonstrating a strong bias for action and the ability to manage complex priorities in a fast-paced environment.
- Pragmatic Problem-Solving: You are a proactive and resourceful problem-solver who is comfortable with ambiguity and sees immense challenges as opportunities for growth.
- Clear Communication: You can articulate complex technical ideas clearly and persuasively to stakeholders across the organization.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated impact on production backend systems
- Hands-on proficiency in Python and experience with distributed systems, large-scale data processing, or cloud infrastructure
- Strong written and verbal communication skills — you will work closely with cross-functional teams and must clearly convey complex technical decisions to engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders

## Compensation and benefits

- Flexible PTO policy.
- 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)

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