Senior Software Engineer, Internal Tools

Senior Software Engineer, Internal Tools

Redwood City, CA (Hybrid)

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.

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

• 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

• 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…