Senior Staff Software Engineer, Internal Tools

Overview

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a philanthropic organization founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. It focuses on leveraging technology to address significant societal issues such as disease prevention and education improvement. The Operations team supports the work of CZI and its nonprofit organizations, Biohub, and Learning Commons.

Opportunity

The Senior Staff Software Engineer for Internal Tools role within CZI's Central Tech team is responsible for setting technical direction for internal tools and AI-powered workflows. This role involves leading the development of applications, agents, integrations, and knowledge infrastructure that enhance employee productivity and efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy by defining the architecture and technical roadmap across the stack
• Architect and maintain reliable, scalable production applications with a focus on infrastructure automation and governance
• Design and build the AI layer—custom agents, workflows, and the knowledge and retrieval substrate that enables reasoning over connected enterprise data
• Tech-lead a small team: set the design and code review bar, partner with engineers on what good looks like, mentor contingent engineering support
• Partner with senior business stakeholders across the org and with embedded engineers in Investments, Biohub, and Learning Commons

Requirements

• 12+ years building production software systems, with meaningful time as a Senior Staff or Principal IC tech-leading small teams
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals—comfortable shipping production applications, backend services, and the integration layer between them
• Experience operating cloud infrastructure for production systems using industry-standard best practices like Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Strong API integration experience at the enterprise SaaS layer—auth, rate limits, schema drift, failure modes
• 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 senior business partners without a translator

Benefits

• Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $241,000 – $331,100
• Discretionary annual performance bonus program
• Employer match on employee 401(k) contributions
• 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