Eng Manager

Zania•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

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. This role exists because we need an Eng Manager 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.

Requirements

Builder first, manager second. This person was (or could be) the strongest engineer on any team they've been part of.
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.
Proven ability to scale a team from small to 20+. They've hired 10–20 engineers in a compressed timeline without lowering the bar.
AI-native mindset. Actively building with LLMs, agents, tool-use, and orchestration frameworks today.
Shipping velocity as a core value. They measure engineering health by what's in production, not what's in Jira.
Deep, not wide. This person goes deep on specific systems, debugs production issues at 2am, and explains architecture tradeoffs to a customer on a sales call.
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

Nice To Haves

Experience with agentic architectures is strongly preferred.
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).

Responsibilities

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.