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ZaniaZaniaSan Francisco, CA

Engineering Manager

Leads engineering end-to-end, combining hands-on architecture and AI/ML delivery with hiring and scaling an engineering organization from roughly 5 to 15–20 engineers. Requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, founding or technical leadership experience, and a proven ability to ship production agentic systems.

Salary not listed
On-site8+ YOEEngineering Management

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Own all engineering output, including product quality, velocity, reliability, and security.
  • Scale the engineering team from approximately 5 to 15–20 engineers in 12 months, with personal involvement in every hire.
  • Establish and enforce a high-velocity shipping culture with weekly demos, continuous deployment, and minimal process overhead.
  • Partner directly with the CEO on product direction, prioritization, and customer-facing technical conversations.
  • Architect and evolve the platform, including LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, and compliance automation, for enterprise scale.
  • Establish lightweight but effective engineering practices, including CI/CD, observability, on-call, and code review standards.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • 8+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in a technical leadership or founding engineering role at a product-led company.
  • Experience scaling an engineering team from small to 20+ engineers, including hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.
  • Deep, hands-on experience shipping AI/ML or agentic systems to production at enterprise scale.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to partner directly with the CEO and represent engineering in customer-facing technical conversations.
  • Ability to make architecture decisions, review and write code, debug production issues, and explain technical tradeoffs.
  • Experience making decisions under uncertainty, cutting scope, and maintaining rapid shipping cycles.

Nice-to-haves

  • Founded or co-founded a technical startup, or served as an early engineering leader.
  • Experience scaling an engineering team through a Series A or Series B at a product-led company.
  • Active experience building with LLMs, agents, tool use, and orchestration frameworks.
  • Knowledge of prompt engineering, evaluation, context-window management, and production-grade AI systems.
  • Experience with agentic architectures.
  • Strong connections in the Bay Area engineering community.
  • Background in security, infrastructure, or enterprise SaaS.
  • Experience in domains where correctness matters, such as fintech, security, health, or compliance.

Compensation and Benefits

  • Significant equity and competitive cash compensation.
  • Reports directly to the CEO.

Skills

AI/MLLLMsagentic architecturesPrompt EngineeringCI/CDObservabilityon-callCode Reviewllm orchestrationenterprise saasSecuritycompliance automationproduction systems

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