Full-Time
Head of Engineering
Posted on 10/31/2025
Zania
11-50 employees
AI-powered GRC automation platform
Compensation Overview
$240k - $300k/yr
Company Does Not Provide H1B Sponsorship
Palo Alto, CA, USA
In Person
 Engineering Management (1) |
|---|
- Eight or more years of experience with at least three years of engineering management experience with a clear track record of building and leading high-performing cross-functional product development teams in a fast-paced high-growth environment.
- Deep technical foundation with a background as a strong engineer who can command the respect of a world-class technical team, with experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning products.
- Execution excellence demonstrated by a proven track record of shipping high-quality products with exceptional speed and precision, and a keen eye for detail.
- World-class organizational and communication skills with the ability to create clarity from ambiguity and align the organization around a vision, communicating effectively with the board, customers, and individual contributors.
- Ownership and growth mindset with adaptability, rapid learning, and a relentless pursuit of building a generational company.
- Build and lead a world-class team by recruiting, hiring, and mentoring talent across engineering, AI research, product management, design, and security, and cultivate a high-performance culture focused on ownership and growth.
- Drive execution and velocity by owning the operational cadence of the product development team, personally running sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, and implementing lightweight processes that accelerate development without sacrificing quality.
- Provide technical leadership by remaining deeply technical and hands-on, guiding critical architectural decisions, contributing to the codebase, solving the hardest technical challenges, and ensuring the development of scalable, secure, and reliable AI systems.
- Champion an AI-first culture by fostering an environment where an AI-first mindset is embedded in every part of the development process and encouraging rapid adoption of new tools and techniques to boost productivity and innovation.
- None
Zania provides an AI-powered GRC platform that uses autonomous AI agents to automate security, privacy, and compliance tasks for enterprises. The platform is delivered as a B2B SaaS offering, enabling clients to subscribe and access AI agents, workflows, and dashboards that streamline risk assessments and compliance processes. The agents perform work across regulatory mapping, evidence collection, policy alignment, and security posture reviews, reducing manual effort and cutting assessment timelines from months to minutes. Zania differentiates itself with deep AI-security expertise from the founding team (including experience at major tech companies) and a focus on automating complex governance and regulatory tasks for regulated industries, rather than relying on generic automation. The main goal is to help enterprises simplify, accelerate, and maintain ongoing governance, risk, and compliance by automating tasks and workflows with AI agents.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$18M
Headquarters
East Palo Alto, California
Founded
2023
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Fortune 500 and Big 4 firms achieve 90% manual effort reduction and 80% cost savings.
- $18M Series A from NEA fuels agent library expansion across full GRC lifecycle.
- 10x ARR growth in six months with clients like Plaid and Stanford University.
What critics are saying
- Drata erodes market share with 20% larger base and lower pricing in 6-12 months.
- Vanta captures Fortune 500 clients via 100+ integrations, slowing ARR 30-40% in 12-18 months.
- SEC probe exposes unverifiable accuracy claims, triggering client exodus in 18-24 months.
What makes Zania unique
- Zania Autonomous TPRM shifts third-party risk assessments from human-led to agent-led execution.
- Agents execute full vendor assessments from intake to audit-ready output with evidence trails.
- Security, Compliance, and Privacy Agents automate SDL, questionnaires, and privacy adherence.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
Company Equity
Company News
Zania, an AI platform for governance, risk and compliance, has launched Zania Autonomous TPRM, which it claims is the first platform to shift third-party risk management from human-led processes to agent-led execution. The system autonomously executes vendor assessments from intake to final determination, including evidence collection and control evaluation. Early deployments across Fortune 500 companies and Big 4 firms report assessment timelines compressed from over eight weeks to under one week, with up to 90% reduction in manual effort and 80% lower costs per assessment. The platform enables organisations to scale coverage from 10% to 100% of vendors without additional headcount. Founded by leaders from Microsoft, Meta and Airbnb, Zania addresses a market expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2033. The platform is now available globally.
The vendor questionnaire is dead: Zania launches autonomous third-party risk management. Business Wire New AI agents execute risk assessments end-to-end, enabling CISOs to achieve 100% vendor coverage without adding headcount. PALO ALTO, Calif., February 10, 2026-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Zania, the agentic AI platform for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), today announced the launch of Zania Autonomous TPRM. This is the first platform that shifts third-party risk management from human-led processes with AI assistance to agent-led execution with human oversight. Every CISO knows the math: a growing vendor ecosystem, a small risk team, and not enough hours to assess every third party. The result is a coverage gap that turns unassessed vendors into blind spots. This is exactly the kind of risk that shows up in board audit committees and post-breach investigations. Unlike AI copilots that assist humans with drafting or summarization, Zania's autonomous agents execute the assessment from intake to final determination. Agents scope vendors by business context, collect evidence from trust centers and public disclosures, coordinate vendor follow-ups, evaluate controls, and produce audit-ready output with a complete evidence trail. This enables teams to expand coverage without adding headcount. Third-party risk continues to be a primary driver of costly data breaches, with over 30% of all breaches now involving a supply chain partner [1]. As vendor ecosystems expand, GRC teams are caught in a persistent "coverage gap," able to deeply assess only their most critical vendors, leaving the rest as a growing blind spot. The global TPRM market is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2033 [2], yet legacy tools have failed to solve this core challenge, focusing on workflow organization rather than task execution. Early Results In early deployments across Fortune 500 enterprises and Big 4 firms, organizations using Zania report: * Assessment timelines compressed from 8+ weeks to under 1 week * Up to 90% reduction in manual assessment effort * Up to 80% lower cost per assessment * Coverage scaled from 10% to 100% of in-scope vendors without increasing headcount From the CEO "For years, 'AI in GRC' has meant a better autocomplete, such as drafting a response, summarizing a report, or helping with a single task. That's not what enterprises need. They need the assessment done, defensibly, at scale, without tripling headcount." "We built Autonomous TPRM to execute the work end to end. It is grounded in evidence, aligned to how risk teams actually operate, and traceable enough to survive an audit. The question isn't whether AI can help with GRC. It's whether your AI can do the job." - Shruti Gupta, Founder & CEO, Zania
Zania, an AI company for security governance, risk, and compliance, raised $18 million in a Series A round led by NEA. The funding will help Zania expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and accelerate its AI platform. Zania's AI agents automate complex compliance tasks, achieving results up to 30× faster and at 90% lower cost. The company has seen 10x ARR growth in six months and secured clients like Plaid and Stanford University.
Zania raises $18M Series A led by NEA to reinvent Enterprise risk & compliance with AI agents.