Senior Software Engineer (Frontend), IDseq, Science at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Redwood City, CA)

Founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education and Justice and Opportunity,  we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and movement building, to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

Our Values

We believe we can help build a future for everyone.

• We aim to be daring, but humble:  We look for bold ideas — regardless of structure and stage — and help them scale by pairing engineers with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.


• We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term: We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.


• Stay close to the real problems: We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.  

Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. 

The Opportunity

By pairing engineers with leaders in our education, science, and justice and opportunity teams, we can bring technology to the table in new ways to help drive solutions. We are uniquely positioned to design, build, and scale software systems to help educators, scientists, and policy experts better address the myriad challenges they face. 

In our Science Initiative, our mission is to support science and technology that will help make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Interdisciplinary teams of physicians, biologists, computational scientists, and engineers can expand our understanding of the human body and illness — the very science behind medicine. CZI fosters collaboration between scientists and engineers, develops tools and technologies, and builds support for basic scientific research. 

Some Science Initiative example projects include:

• IDseq - a metagenomics platform that delivers insights in infectious disease


• cellxgene - an open source interactive data explorer for single-cell transcriptomics data


• Meta - a semantic discovery tool that provides a faster way to understand, organize and explore science through personalized feeds


• Starfish - an open source image processing framework, enabling access to multiplex image-based transcriptomics analysis


• napari - an open source interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for python

As a Senior Software Engineer on the IDseq team, you will have the opportunity to build out our Infectious Disease Sequencing tool, a collaboration between CZI and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The tool, which began as a research project at Dr. Joseph DeRisi’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, works by rapidly combing through terabytes of metagenomic data for pathogens in a given sample — be they bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites. IDseq has demonstrated its ability to detect disease in the field by helping scientists in Bangladesh determine the cause of a meningitis outbreak, by helping researchers in Cambodia confirm the country’s first case of COVID-19, and through other pilot projects at global health research sites around the world in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It has also been used extensively by researchers at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and other US research institutions, processing more than 40,000 samples and hundreds of terabytes of data. 

You will

• Drive user impact and delight by working across the web stack, from the data access layer to the presentation layer (SQL, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React), with an emphasis on the frontend


• Build and improve rich, interactive, data-intensive visualizations of scientific results, as well as flows for submitting, generating and organizing data


• Work with Product Managers, UX Designers, and biological scientists to design, build and support new technical solutions


• Be a leader who takes on projects with high scope, assesses trade-offs between building on existing open source tools versus crafting new ones in-house, and promotes engineering excellence around web application development

You have

• Strong experience as a full-stack web developer shipping complex products end-to-end with minimal guidance (5+ years)


• Strong experience in frontend development (JavaScript, React)


• Strong experience in server-side web frameworks


• Experience working with relational databases


• Ability and desire to mentor others on achieving engineering excellence and to be a catalyst on the team


• Some experience with applications hosted on AWS would be a plus

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