Senior 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.

This role is about building the internal tools and AI-powered workflows that make CZI's business teams more effective at the work they do. As a Senior Software Engineer for Internal Tools, you'll own the design and delivery of individual systems end-to-end — applications, agents, integrations, and the knowledge infrastructure that turn back-office work into something teams can do faster, better, and with more leverage. You'll partner with the team's tech lead on architecture and bring strong points of view to that partnership.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact senior IC role on a deliberately small team — the leverage comes from depth and design discipline, not headcount. Success looks like systems you've shipped that business teams adopt and rely on, technical patterns that get reused instead of rebuilt every quarter, and a track record of solid, durable work in a small senior team

What You'll Do

Own the design and delivery of individual systems end-to-end — from scoping with business stakeholders through production deployment

Build the production applications business teams use day-to-day

Design and build AI features — custom agents, workflows, and the knowledge and retrieval substrate that lets them reason over connected enterprise data

Partner with the tech lead on architecture decisions; contribute strong points of view on tradeoffs, patterns, and reuse

Potentially contribute to the team's cloud footprint over time — pragmatic infrastructure decisions, deployment, observability, and reliability for what the team ships, as the scope of the team develops

Partner with senior business stakeholders and embedded engineers across the organization

What You'll Bring

5+ years building production software systems as a senior IC, with a track record of owning meaningful surfaces end-to-end

Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals — comfortable shipping production applications, backend services, and the integration layer between them

Direct production experience building LLM-based applications, custom agents, or agentic workflows

Strong API integration experience at the enterprise SaaS layer — auth, rate limits, schema drift, failure modes

Working fluency with MCP, LLM tool/function calling, current agent frameworks, and retrieval/knowledge infrastructure (knowledge graphs, vector stores, RAG)

Comfort with ambiguity; ability to make progress when requirements are evolving

Strong stakeholder fluency; you can hold technical conversations with business partners without a translator

Nice to have:

Background in enterprise IT, business systems, or platform engineering

Experience operating cloud infrastructure (AWS, Terraform) for production systems

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $190,000 – $238,000. 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.

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