Software Engineer

Zania•San Francisco, CA

18d•$100,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve a massive problem in the enterprise software market. 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 and has a world-class team with leaders from top tech companies. The company is at the forefront of applied AI, building the next generation of agentic systems. This role is for a Founding Software Engineer (Mid–Senior Level) who will be a core member of the engineering team, building the backend systems that power both the core product and the agentic AI platform. This is a backend-focused role for engineers who thrive on solving challenges at a massive scale, with full-stack experience being a strong plus. The engineer will design, build, and deploy critical infrastructure and services handling petabyte-scale data retrieval and running thousand-step AI agents, tackling demanding problems with government-level security and reliability.

Requirements

4-8 years of professional software engineering experience (not intended for recent graduates).
A demonstrated track record of delivering complex, high-quality backend systems.
You have a history of building and launching robust products or platforms, ideally in a hyper-growth or 0-to-1 startup environment.
You are a hands-on, highly technical backend engineer with proficiency in Python: For building robust backend services and AI pipelines.
Experience with distributed systems, large-scale data processing (e.g., Spark), and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP).
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.
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

Nice To Haves

Full-stack experience is a strong plus.
TypeScript and React: Experience is a plus for contributing across the stack but is not required.

Responsibilities

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.