{"id":36839,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zania-applied-ai-engineer","title":"Senior Applied AI Engineer","company":{"id":8463,"name":"Zania","domain":"zania.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zania","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":230000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":230000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"Explainable AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-07-20T02:52:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-07-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T07:53:45Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":454,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":454},"description":"Why Zania\nEvery enterprise spends millions on Governance, Risk, and Compliance. It's one of the most critical - and most painful - parts of running a business. The industry has been dominated by legacy platforms with notoriously low NPS scores for decades. It's completely ripe for disruption.\nZania is building agentic AI for GRC to solve this problem. We're building intelligent agents that execute complex risk and compliance workflows with full explainability - not dashboards, not copilots, but agents that do the work. We've found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling fast.\nWhy join:\nDream Customers: FAANG companies, Big 4 firms, and a portfolio of the world's most notable enterprises.\n\nTier 1 Backing: Series A led by NEA, with Anthropic and Menlo Ventures. $18M raised to build a generational company.\n\nWorld-Class Team: AI and security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.\n\nPioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.\n\nHyper-Growth: 10x ARR growth in the last year.\n\nCompetitive Compensation & Equity.\n\nThe role\nYou will build AI systems designed to outperform the world's leading experts in Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Not research. Not prototypes. Production systems with a fanatical focus on accuracy, explainability, and responsible design. You will own the AI-native products that set a new global standard for GRC.\nWe use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance.\nWhat you'll do\nBuild & fine-tune models. Fine-tune foundation models on proprietary data and implement novel techniques to achieve world-class accuracy on complex GRC tasks.\n\nDevelop AI-native workflows. Build sophisticated, multi-step agentic workflows that automate complex GRC processes - from risk assessment to compliance monitoring to evidence collection.\n\nChampion responsible AI. Implement and pioneer methods for AI explainability and safety. Our systems must be transparent, auditable, and fair. This is non-negotiable in our domain.\n\nDrive innovation. Rapidly prototype, evaluate, and integrate state-of-the-art research (agents, RAG, new architectures) into reliable, production-grade features.\n\nRepresentative projects\nBuild an AI agent that analyzes thousands of regulatory documents and internal controls, identifying compliance gaps with higher accuracy than a team of human experts.\n\nDevelop an explainable AI system for risk assessment, allowing auditors and executives to understand and trust the AI's reasoning on high-stakes decisions.\n\nBuild an advanced RAG pipeline over a massive corpus of unstructured company data to produce precise, verifiable assessments against complex compliance requirements.\n\nPartner with GRC subject matter experts to create ground-truth datasets for tasks like third-party risk evaluation, then fine-tune models that become the industry standard.\n\nWhat you have\n5-8 years in an applied AI or machine learning engineering role.\n\nProven product sense. You've shipped reliable, production-scale ML products. You know how to use offline evaluation and online experimentation to achieve high-performance results.\n\nHands-on applied AI expertise. Direct experience building with LLMs - fine-tuning, RAG, and agentic systems. Not theoretical. You've put these into production.\n\nHigh agency. You take full ownership of outcomes, move with a bias for action, and have a relentless drive for world-class accuracy. You see constraints as design problems, not blockers.\n\nStrong communication. You can work closely with security and GRC research counterparts and articulate technical tradeoffs clearly.\n\nMinimum Qualifications\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience\n\n4+ years of experience in applied AI, machine learning engineering, or a related technical role\n\nDemonstrated hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based systems (fine-tuning, RAG, or agentic workflows) in a production environment\n\nStrong written and verbal communication skills - you will collaborate closely with GRC subject matter experts and must translate technical tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders\n\nCompensation & benefits\nCompetitive salary + significant equity\n\nFlexible PTO\n\nMedical, dental, and vision insurance\n\nMeals and snacks in the office\n\nRelocation and immigration support\n\nZania 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4757,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Relocation assistance","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Security Compliance","AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2025-07-20T02:52:15Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2","filings_12m":2,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":157500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":2}],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.19,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":454,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":230000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zania-applied-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zania-applied-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T08:04:12Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":10925,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":8463},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=8463"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzania-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzania-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzania-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zania-applied-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzania-applied-ai-engineer"}]}