Product Design Engineer

Product Design Engineer, Zania Palo Alto, CA · Full-Time · Series A

The one-line version: You design it, you build it, you ship it. And you do it faster than anyone thought possible.

Why this role exists

GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) is one of the most important and most broken categories in enterprise software. The tools that exist today are genuinely terrible. Low NPS. Ugly interfaces. Workflows designed around paperwork, not people. Billions of dollars flow through software that nobody enjoys using.

Zania is rebuilding this from scratch with AI agents. We're not putting a chatbot on top of a legacy product. We're rethinking what compliance and risk management looks like when the software can actually think, when it can reason, execute, and explain itself. That's a genuinely novel design problem, and nobody has solved it yet.

This role exists because we believe the best way to solve it is through someone who refuses to separate design from engineering. Not a designer who codes a little. Not an engineer with taste. Someone who is fully both, who wakes up thinking about user flows and goes to sleep debugging a React component.

What you'll actually do

You will own the end-to-end user experience of our product. Not a slice of it. All of it.

That means you're the person who figures out how a Fortune 500 CISO should feel when they open Zania. How trust gets communicated when an AI agent has just autonomously completed a vendor risk assessment. What the interface looks like when something goes wrong. How we surface complexity without creating it.

You will go from insight to working prototype faster than anyone expects. Not because we'll push you to move fast and break things, but because the tools available to exceptional builders today make it genuinely possible to compress weeks into days. And you know how to use them.

You'll work directly with our founder, sit with engineering, and put real prototypes in front of real customers. No lengthy approval chains. No design-by-committee. You make the call.

Concretely, this looks like:

Building the interface for our SOC 2 Agent, taking a process that used to take a year of painful back-and-forth and making it feel effortless and transparent.

Designing and shipping an end-to-end third-party risk management workflow that makes a traditionally manual, spreadsheet-driven process feel genuinely automated and intelligent.

Creating and owning our component library, the visual and technical foundation that every future product experience is built on.

Running design research with CISOs and Chief Risk Officers using real, interactive prototypes. Not wireframes. Not decks. Working software.

The kind of person we're looking for

You have 5+ years bridging product design and front-end engineering on complex B2B products. You're as comfortable in a codebase as you are in Figma. Honestly, you spend more time in the codebase.

You have strong opinions about what makes software feel good. You notice the things most people don't. You get genuinely frustrated by bad UX in the tools you use, and that frustration makes you better at your job.

You think AI is the most interesting design medium that has ever existed. Not because it's trendy, but because building human trust in autonomous systems is a legitimately hard and interesting problem. You want to invent new interaction patterns, not copy existing ones.

You ship fast. You know how to make that happen, and you're always finding ways to do it better.

You're comfortable with ambiguity. In fact, you prefer it. A blank canvas over a detailed spec. You do your best work when the problem isn't fully defined yet.

You can walk into a room of senior security professionals and earn their trust through the quality of what you've built.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Design, Computer Science, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 5+ years of experience bridging product design and front-end engineering, with a portfolio demonstrating end-to-end ownership of complex B2B products

• Proficiency in both design tooling (e.g., Figma) and front-end development (e.g., React, TypeScript) — comfort in a codebase is as important as visual craft

• Strong written and verbal communication skills — you will present working prototypes directly to senior enterprise security professionals and must earn credibility quickly

Why Zania

Our customers include FAANG companies, Big 4 firms, and some of the most recognized enterprises in the world. We're backed by NEA, Menlo Ventures, and Anthropic, and we've grown 10x in ARR over the last year.

Our founder built security infrastructure at Airbnb, led Microsoft Security Copilot, and served as CISO at Instacart and Brex. The team is small, senior, and deeply technical.

You will have more creative and strategic ownership in this role than you would in a design team of 50 at a larger company. The product surface is being invented right now. What you build here will be seen and used by some of the most sophisticated technology buyers in the world.

Competitive salary and equity. Medical, dental, and vision. Flexible PTO. Meals and snacks in the office. Relocation and immigration support.

Palo Alto, CA. In-person.

Zania is an equal opportunity employer.