--- title: 'VP of Engineering at Nace AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-nace-ai-palo-alto-q8d26ckgppqq' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # VP of Engineering at Nace AI - **Company:** Nace AI - **Location:** Palo Alto, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai/6f72348f-e525-4fa9-9a41-0615512718df ## Job description VP of Engineering Palo Alto, CA · Full-time · On-site ## About Nace AI Nace AI builds trustworthy, specialized enterprise intelligence. Our AI agents automate financial audit, accounting, and compliance workflows for enterprises where accuracy, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable. We are headquartered in Palo Alto and backed by General Catalyst, Walden Catalyst, and Intel. ## About the Role We are hiring a VP of Engineering to lead and scale our engineering organization. This is one of the most senior roles at Nace AI. You will partner directly with our CEO and CTO to translate our research and product vision into reliable, enterprise-grade systems — and build the team, processes, and culture that make world-class execution repeatable. In this role, you will own engineering delivery end to end: planning, execution, quality, and velocity across a distributed team of researchers and engineers. You will be equally comfortable setting technical direction in an architecture review and unblocking a critical customer deployment. ## What You Will Do - Lead, grow, and retain a high-caliber engineering organization spanning ML, platform, and product engineering - Own delivery: set roadmaps with product and research leadership, drive execution, and hold a high bar for quality and speed - Partner with the CTO on system architecture, technical strategy, and build-vs-buy decisions - Establish engineering processes that scale — planning cycles, code review standards, incident response, and on-call practices - Ensure our systems meet the reliability, security, and compliance expectations of enterprise financial customers (SOC 2, data governance, auditability) - Recruit senior engineering talent and design the org structure for our next stage of growth - Represent engineering with customers, partners, and investors as needed - Manage effectively across a globally distributed team and time zones ## What We Are Looking For - 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams at high-growth startups or enterprise software companies - Proven track record scaling an engineering org from ~10 to 50+ engineers while maintaining velocity and quality - Deep technical fluency in modern ML/AI systems, distributed infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS — you can go toe-to-toe with senior ICs on architecture - Experience shipping and operating products for enterprise customers with strict security and compliance requirements; fintech, audit, or regulated-industry background is a strong plus - Professional proficiency in both English and Russian, enabling effective collaboration across our distributed, multilingual engineering team - Strong operational instincts: you build lightweight processes that create leverage, not bureaucracy - Exceptional judgment on hiring — you have built teams people want to join and stay on - Based in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area; this role is on-site in Palo Alto ## Preferred Qualifications - Experience with LLM-based products, agentic systems, or applied research environments - Prior experience as a founder, founding engineer, or first VP of Engineering - Familiarity with financial audit, accounting, or compliance domains ## Why Nace AI You will join at a pivotal stage: strong backing, real enterprise customers, and a research team pushing the frontier of specialized enterprise intelligence. As our most senior engineering leader, you will shape not just what we build, but how we build — and who we build it with. ## About Nace AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Nace AI builds long-horizon reasoning models and AI agents that audit, reconcile, and report on financial and compliance data for enterprises. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed / Series A – $21.5M raised in 2026) - **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Zhanibek Datbayev (CTO/Co-Founder), Ritesh Shrivastava (Co-Founder), Sudha Valluru (COO/Co-Founder), Swathi B (Co-Founder), and others ## Core Business - **Primary industries**: Audit, Compliance, Finance, Accounting, Enterprise AI - **Target customers**: B2B enterprise – specifically audit firms, finance departments, compliance teams, and professional services firms - **Mission**: Build long-horizon AI that runs organizations; give professionals their time back by automating high-stakes knowledge work ## Products & Services - **Metamodel**: A specialized small language model (SLM) platform that enterprises can customize with their own policies and knowledge. Used for audit, contract governance, and financial reporting. - **Agentic Accounting**: AI agent that executes end-to-end financial audits, billing audits, and revenue leakage detection by connecting directly to databases. - **Nace Verification Intelligence**: Evidence-based reasoning engine that processes up to 1 million files (PDFs, spreadsheets, databases) to automate SOX 404 reports, contract compliance checks, and due diligence. - **Nace Process Automation**: Automatically maps transaction flows across 10+ disparate databases to visualize and reconcile processes. - **The Macros**: A research preview product that lets power users create custom AI macros for repetitive professional tasks. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $21.5M (May 2026 round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES); earlier $5M seed round (April 2025) led by General Catalyst. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Walden Catalyst Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES - **Growth Signals**: - Launched from stealth in March 2025 with Metamodel 1 - Raised $21.5M within 14 months of founding - Operations in 7 countries (US, Kazakhstan, India, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Georgia) - 2,574 LinkedIn followers (+141% YoY) - Active job postings for senior roles (Product Manager, Audit Consultant, Growth Lead) ## Competitive Advantages - **Metamodel approach**: Enterprises can turn internal policies and employee knowledge into custom, on‑premise AI models, enforcing consistency and accuracy. - **Evidence‑based reasoning**: The system explains exactly where it looked and why – building trust in regulated environments (SOC 2 Type II, AICPA audited infrastructure). - **Small model efficiency**: Uses specialized small language models (SLMs) instead of massive general LLMs, making deployments faster, cheaper, and compliant with data sovereignty requirements. - **End‑to‑end automation**: Covers the entire audit workflow – from raw database ingestion to boardroom‑ready reports – without any manual spreadsheet work. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale the Metamodel platform**: Turn enterprise policies into custom AI agents for every department. - **Expand into adjacent compliance verticals** (tax, due diligence, contract governance). - **Grow the team** across engineering, product, and go‑to‑market roles (currently 39–50 employees, with a heavy technical tilt of ~45%). - **Maintain on‑premises / hybrid cloud deployments** to meet strict regulatory requirements of audit and finance clients. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Fast‑paced research‑first environment assembling a “world‑class team” to solve high‑stakes scaling challenges in AI reasoning. - **Work model**: Hybrid workspace (Palo Alto offices); many roles are in‑office for close collaboration on complex ML and product work. - **Team composition**: Heavy technical concentration (45% of staff are engineers/researchers), with deep domain expertise from ex‑Dropbox, Bloomberg, McKinsey, and AI labs. - **Impact**: Build infrastructure that gives audit, compliance, and finance professionals their time back – directly reduces manual drudgery in multi‑billion‑dollar compliance markets. - **Perks**: Not explicitly detailed, but the company emphasizes “autonomy, impact, and working on the hardest AI problems in enterprise.” ## Sources 1. [nace.ai](https://nace.ai/) 2. [nace.ai/careers](https://nace.ai/careers) 3. [LinkedIn – Nace AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nace-ai) 4. [Built In – Nace.AI](https://builtin.com/company/nace-ai) 5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com – Nace AI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai) ## Other roles at Nace AI - [Technical Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-nace-ai-palo-alto-8py4nbage3rw) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior MLOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mlops-engineer-nace-ai-palo-alto-x8adzytpzn63) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Product Designer (AI & Prototyping)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-ai-prototyping-nace-ai-palo-alto-g533v3r04kqy) — Palo Alto, CA - [Financial Audit Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/financial-audit-consultant-nace-ai-palo-alto-xd0vjpcf326t) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-technical-recruiter-nace-ai-palo-alto-w9tkfpeqqv2f) — Palo Alto, CA - [Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-lead-nace-ai-palo-alto-7bw1bwfdqydv) — Palo Alto, CA - [Valuation Due Diligence Expert](https://feeny.ai/job/valuation-due-diligence-expert-nace-ai-palo-alto-c51g3m2xy7q0) — Palo Alto, CA - [SOX Audit Expert](https://feeny.ai/job/sox-audit-expert-nace-ai-palo-alto-3tznenh4xa5w) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-nace-ai-palo-alto-vsa8p0mak591) — Palo Alto, CA - [Tax Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/tax-consultant-nace-ai-palo-alto-hryt0rr498zw) — Palo Alto, CA