Zania · 5 months ago
Staff Applied AI Engineer
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
6+ years expZania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve critical industry challenges. As a Staff Applied AI Engineer, you will lead the development of AI systems that enhance accuracy and innovation in GRC workflows, setting new standards in the field.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)ComplianceCyber SecurityEnterprise Software
Responsibilities
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
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
Qualification
Required
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
Benefits
Competitive Compensation & Equity
Relocation assistance
Company
Zania
Autonomous AI agents for Security Risk and Compliance
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Zania has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2024 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$18MKey Investors
New Enterprise Associates
2025-09-30Series A· $18M
Recent News
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2025-10-10
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