AI Team Lead

Zafran is building the next generation of vulnerability and risk management. We bring together complex security data and turn it into clear investigation, prioritization, and action. We’re creating a new AI team to build the shared infrastructure, tools, and standards that enable teams across R&D to develop reliable AI-powered capabilities. The team will also own and deliver core AI experiences used across Zafran’s platform and organization. We’re looking for an experienced AI Team Lead to build and lead this team — someone who combines strong engineering leadership with hands-on experience building production AI systems and platforms.

About Zafran

Our Mission: To stop the exploitation of vulnerabilities, everywhere.

What makes us different: Zafran de-risks 90% of critical vulnerabilities overnight across your hybrid environment and utilizes Agentic Capabilities and your existing security tools to rapidly mitigate and remediate the 10% most likely to be exploited. We have a deep belief that cybersecurity defence should move as fast as attackers do, and we provide an agentic response to agentic attacks. ​​Who’s behind us : Zafran is a Post C, hyper growing start-up, backed by Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures. We’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry, scaling to meet demand from the world’s most advanced, security-obsessed organizations.

We’re serious about our mission- so expect work that matters, teammates who challenge and inspire you, and plenty of fun along the way!

What you’ll do

• Build and lead Zafran’s AI dedicated team from the ground up.
• Define, implement and maintain the company-wide AI platform, infrastructure, and developer tools.
• Enable R&D teams to build, test, deploy, and monitor AI-powered capabilities independently.
• Lead the design and delivery of shared AI experiences and services across the company.
• Establish standards for quality, reliability, security, observability, and cost management.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, Security Research, and other teams to identify high-impact opportunities and turn them into scalable solutions.
• Stay hands-on with architecture, implementation, production issues, and technical decisions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar for AI development across R&D.

Requirements

• Experience leading engineers in an AI, infrastructure, or backend team.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and system design skills.
• Production experience building AI-powered applications or infrastructure around large language models.
• Experience with model APIs, retrieval, evaluation, prompt and context management, tool use, and agentic workflows.
• Ability to design systems that are reliable, scalable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient.
• Strong product thinking and the ability to turn broad AI opportunities into practical capabilities.
• Excellent cross-team collaboration and communication skills.
• Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment where the team and technical foundations are still being shaped.

Nice to have

• Experience building internal developer infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience with model evaluation, safety controls, governance, or production monitoring.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS systems.
• Background in cybersecurity or security-data products.
• Experience building a new team or introducing AI practices across an engineering organization.
• Why this role matters
• AI will become a shared capability across Zafran’s products and engineering organization. This team will create the foundation that helps every R&D team build AI features faster and more safely, while also owning strategic AI experiences for the company.
• This is an opportunity to shape Zafran’s AI architecture, engineering standards, and team from the ground up.