Staff Applied AI Engineer

Why Zania

Every enterprise spends millions of dollars on Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). It's one of the most critical, yet universally painful, parts of running a business. For decades, this industry has been dominated by legacy systems with notoriously low NPS scores, making it totally ripe for disruption.

Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve this massive problem. We are on a rocketship trajectory, creating intelligent agents that automate and augment the most complex risk and compliance workflows. We have found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling our team very quickly. Some reasons to join Zania are:

• Dream Customers: Our customers are the most notable enterprises in the world, including FAANG, Big 4 firms and a portfolio of top customers.

• Tier 1 Backing: Funded by a leading Tier 1 venture capital fund, giving us the resources to build a generational company.

• World-Class Team: Zania is hiring the best. Our team includes AI and Security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain & Company, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.

• Pioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building the next generation of agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.

• Hyper-Growth: We have seen 10x ARR growth in the last year and are rapidly expanding.

• Competitive Compensation & Equity.

Role Overview

As a Staff Applied AI Engineer, you will lead the charge in creating AI systems designed to outperform the world's leading experts in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). We are seeking an engineer to build production AI systems with a fanatical focus on accuracy, innovation, and responsible design. You will own and build the AI-native products that set a new global standard for GRC.

This role is based in our Palo Alto, CA office. We use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance.

What You'll Do

• Build & Fine-Tune Models: Lead the fine-tuning of foundation models on proprietary data and implement novel techniques to achieve world-class accuracy and precision on complex GRC tasks.

• Develop AI-Native Workflows: Design and build sophisticated, multi-step agentic workflows that automate complex GRC processes, from risk assessment to compliance monitoring.

• Champion Responsible AI: Implement and pioneer methods for AI explainability and safety, ensuring our systems are transparent, auditable, and fair.

• Drive Innovation: Rapidly prototype, evaluate, and integrate state-of-the-art AI research (agents, RAG, new architectures) into reliable, production-grade features.

Representative Projects

• Design and build an AI agent to analyze thousands of regulatory documents and internal controls, identifying potential compliance gaps with a higher accuracy rate than a team of human experts.

• Develop a novel, explainable AI system for our risk assessment models, allowing auditors and executives to understand and trust the AI's reasoning for high-stakes decisions.

• Architect an advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline over a massive corpus of unstructured company data to provide precise, verifiable assessments over complex compliance requirements.

• Partner with GRC subject matter experts to create a ground-truth dataset for a complex task, like third-party risk evaluation, and use it to fine-tune a model that becomes the industry standard.

What You Have

• 6+ years of experience (post-M.S./Ph.D.) in an applied AI or machine learning engineering role.

• Proven Product Sense: You have a track record of shipping reliable, production-scale ML products and understand how to use offline evaluation and online experimentation to achieve high-performance results.

• Expertise in Applied AI: You have direct, hands-on experience building with LLMs, including fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic systems.

• High-Agency & Drive: You demonstrate a relentless drive for world-class accuracy and take full ownership of outcomes, moving with a bias for action in fast-paced environments. You see challenges as growth opportunities.

• Exceptional Communication: You can clearly communicate with Security research counterparts.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Equity: In addition to the base salary, equity may be part of the total compensation package.

Zania is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.