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Staff Software Engineer, Internal Tools

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative· Engineering - CEN
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Hybrid (Redwood City, CA)$214k - $268k + bonusfull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Staff-level engineer focused on internal tools at CZI, owning domain architecture, delivery, and AI-powered workflows to empower Biohub and Learning Commons teams. Hybrid, in-person collaboration with security, infrastructure, and partner-facing stakeholders.

Responsibilities

  • 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

Qualifications

  • 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

Skills

Required:Technical leadership and domain ownershipFull-stack software developmentLLM-based applications and agent frameworksEnterprise SaaS integrationsKnowledge retrieval infrastructureStakeholder management and product judgment

Benefits

  • Provides a generous 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
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Our Approach to Solving Society’s Toughest Problems

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative tackles society’s toughest challenges: eradicating disease, improving education, and addressing local communities.

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