AI Engineering Leader & Scale Architect

Zania; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Zania is seeking an Engineering Manager who will own engineering end-to-end, including architecture decisions, hiring, shipping cadence, and team culture. This is a hands-on technical leadership role to scale from ~5 to 20+ engineers in the next year, while ensuring the product is world-class.

The role requires shipping AI/ML products to production with an enterprise focus, strong execution, and a founder-like mindset.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or founding role at a product-led company.
• Experience scaling an engineering team to 20+ engineers and hiring senior technical talent.
• Deep hands-on experience shipping AI/ML or agentic systems to production at enterprise scale.
• Strong written and verbal communication, especially with the CEO and customers.

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.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Hiring & team-building

AI/ML production

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

Equivalent practical experience

Job description

Zania is seeking an Engineering Manager who will own engineering end-to-end, including architecture decisions, hiring, shipping cadence, and team culture. This is a hands-on technical leadership role to scale from ~5 to 20+ engineers in the next year, while ensuring the product is world-class.

The role requires shipping AI/ML products to production with an enterprise focus, strong execution, and a founder-like mindset.