Director of Engineering

Zania•San Francisco, CA

1d•$230,000 - $280,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve a massive problem in the enterprise software space. The company has found exceptional product-market fit and is experiencing hyper-growth, with 10x ARR growth in the last year. Zania is backed by a leading Tier 1 venture capital fund (NEA, Anthropic, Menlo Ventures) and has raised $18M. The team consists of AI and Security leaders from top tech companies. As Director of Engineering, you will lead the teams building AI agents that perform GRC tasks for demanding enterprises. This is a hands-on technical leadership role involving engineering execution, team growth, and architectural decision-making. The agents review evidence, answer security questionnaires, assess vendors, and map controls across various frameworks. The role requires ensuring speed of delivery without compromising accuracy, security, and reliability. You will collaborate with the Head of Engineering, founders, product, and GRC experts.

Requirements

Strong engineering skills with the ability to review code, identify architectural flaws, and make corrections.
Shipped LLM, agentic, or ML systems to production, with an understanding of evaluation, context management, and production readiness.
Experience growing engineering teams through Series A/B funding stages and developing engineers into leaders.
Focus on shipping velocity, measuring engineering health by production deployments and removing process bottlenecks.
Experience building in domains where correctness is critical, such as security, compliance, fintech, or health.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of software engineering experience.
4+ years managing engineers.
2+ years leading managers or multiple teams.
Hands-on experience shipping AI/ML, LLM, or agentic systems to production for enterprise customers.
Demonstrated experience hiring and scaling engineering teams at a high-growth, product-led company.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to represent engineering with customers and executives.

Nice To Haves

Background in security, infrastructure, GRC, or enterprise SaaS.
Experience as a founder or early engineering leader (employee #1–20).
Experience meeting enterprise security requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP) for your own platform.
A network of strong engineers in the Bay Area.

Responsibilities

Own engineering execution across multiple teams with weekly ship cycles and a culture of daily deployment.
Hire, onboard, and develop senior engineers and first-line managers, maintaining a high hiring bar.
Guide the architecture of LLM orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic workflow systems for accuracy, explainability, and enterprise scale.
Establish practical standards for code review, testing, LLM evaluations, observability, on-call, and incident response to raise quality and reliability.
Partner with security and GRC leads to meet security, privacy, and deployment requirements of Fortune 500 customers, and participate in customer technical conversations.
Translate customer feedback and agent failure patterns into prioritized engineering work in collaboration with product and GRC experts.