Staff Software Engineer, Internal Tools

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg to harness the power of technology to pursue some of society’s most ambitious goals — from curing or preventing all disease to transforming how students learn.

At CZI, you’ll join a deeply collaborative, mission-driven community where your work helps drive breakthroughs across our flagship nonprofit organizations, Biohub and Learning Commons. Whether enabling scientific breakthroughs via open science and AI-powered biology or strengthening the tools teachers and students rely on every day, your contributions help turn bold ideas into real-world impact.

Our teams operate at the intersection of innovation and scale, building the infrastructure, partnerships, and capabilities that allow scientists, educators, and innovators to tackle some of the most complex challenges of our time — and to do so with urgency, integrity, and optimism.

The Team

The Operations team is a key partner in enabling Biohub’s pioneering work to combine frontier AI with frontier biology to solve disease and Learning Commons’ mission to build AI infrastructure that aligns how students learn with the tools that shape their learning experiences.

Operations includes our Central Tech, Finance, Marketing & Communications, People, and Real Estate / Workplace / Events / Facilities / Security (REWFS) teams. Together, these teams create the systems, programs, and experiences that empower our partners and colleagues across Biohub and Learning Commons to drive impact.

This work requires strategic and operational rigor, creativity, and deep collaboration. Whether designing world-class employee experiences, safeguarding data and infrastructure, or shaping how we communicate our impact, Operations plays a critical role in helping deliver meaningful change at scale.

The Opportunity

Our Central Tech team provides technology and security support for CZI and our grantees. We believe that Engineering, IT and Security are most effective when in sync and learning from each other on a daily basis. Across our three pillars of Infrastructure, Security, and Grantee & Partner Support, we enable our teams to achieve their goals faster and more securely. We leverage technology to automate manual processes, constantly innovate to optimize operations, provide first-class support, and build solutions to enable the scale and execution of our business partners' strategies and initiatives.

As a Staff Software Engineer for Internal Tools, you'll own a technical domain spanning the applications, backend services, integrations, and AI-powered workflows that help CZI's business teams work more effectively. You'll translate ambiguous business needs into technical direction, lead architecture and delivery across related systems, and remain deeply involved in implementation. You'll partner with the Senior Staff tech lead to align your domain with the team's broader platform strategy.

This is a hands-on Staff IC role on a deliberately small team. Success means shipping systems that business teams adopt and rely on, establishing reusable capabilities across workstreams, and improving how the organization builds and operates internal tools. You'll combine technical depth, product judgment, and influence across teams to deliver measurable business outcomes.

What You'll Do

• Own technical direction and end-to-end delivery for a domain of internal tools, from identifying business needs and sequencing work through deployment, adoption, and ongoing operation
• Build production applications, backend services, and enterprise integrations; identify shared capabilities that reduce duplicate work across business teams
• Design and build AI-powered agents, workflows, and knowledge and retrieval infrastructure, with practical approaches to evaluation, permissions, reliability, and human oversight
• Drive architecture decisions within your domain and partner with the Senior Staff tech lead on broader platform direction; establish reusable patterns and make tradeoffs clear
• Own production readiness and reliability for the systems you ship, including deployment, observability, failure handling, and maintainability; partner on shared cloud infrastructure as the team's scope develops
• Partner with senior business stakeholders, PMO, and embedded engineers to shape priorities, resolve dependencies, and drive adoption; raise engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years building production software, with demonstrated Staff-level scope: independently setting technical direction for complex systems, leading delivery across related workstreams, and influencing engineers and stakeholders beyond your immediate project
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals with depth in backend services and enterprise integrations, and the ability to build and operate production applications end-to-end
• Direct production experience building LLM-based applications, custom agents, or agentic workflows, with sound judgment about evaluation, reliability, and when AI is appropriate
• Strong enterprise SaaS integration experience, including authentication, authorization, rate limits, schema changes, and failure recovery
• Working fluency with MCP, LLM tool/function calling, agent frameworks, and retrieval or knowledge infrastructure, with the ability to choose practical approaches as tools evolve
• Experience turning ambiguous business problems into a technical plan, sequencing delivery, and balancing immediate needs with long-term maintainability
• Strong stakeholder and product judgment; ability to explain tradeoffs, build alignment across technical and nontechnical teams, and demonstrate measurable business impact
• Nice to have:
  • Background in enterprise IT, business systems, or platform engineering; experience operating AWS infrastructure and using Terraform
  • Experience establishing shared engineering patterns across teams

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $214,000 – $268,000. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process.

This position may be eligible to participate in our discretionary annual performance bonus program. Bonus eligibility and targets are determined in accordance with our total rewards philosophy and may vary by role.

Better Together

As we grow, we’re excited to strengthen in-person connections and cultivate a collaborative, team-oriented environment. This role is a hybrid position requiring you to be onsite for at least 60% of the working month, approximately 3 days a week, with specific in-office days determined by the team’s manager. The exact schedule will be at the hiring manager's discretion and communicated during the interview process.

Benefits for the Whole You

We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.

• Provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
• Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice.
• Funding for select family-forming benefits.
• Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving

If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.