Senior Software Engineer, IDseq, Science
Redwood City, CA

Job Description

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. Our technology team is already helping schools bring personalized learning tools to teachers and schools across the country and supporting scientists around the world as they develop a comprehensive reference atlas of all cells in the human body.

Our Technology team in Science is seeking an experienced generalist engineer to build out the Infectious Disease Sequencing (IDseq) 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. By identifying disease-causing pathogens, IDseq can then provide an actionable report of what is happening on the ground in labs and clinics anywhere in the world. IDseq has already demonstrated its ability to detect disease in the field through a recent pilot project with the Child Health Research Foundation in Bangladesh. It has also been used extensively by researchers at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and other US research institutions, processing more than ten thousand samples and hundreds of terabytes of data. This year, IDseq is soft-launching to more global health research sites around the world through a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

You will have a direct impact on all the data processing and presentation needs of the IDseq platform. You will work closely with other IDseq team members, with CZI's shared infrastructure team, and with scientific collaborators to design, build and support technical solutions. You will also support us in cultivating best practices. To the extent compatible with your preferences and the team's needs, this role can split time between CZI's Redwood City offices and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco (Mission Bay).

You will

* Design, build, analyze and improve the efficiency, stability, and resiliency of data processing systems and their integration with our web application
* Work with computational biologists to refine and scale genomics pipelines
* Collaborate with the shared infrastructure team and evangelize best practices in the team

You have

* 6+ years of experience building end-to-end systems
* Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or similar cloud providers
* Experience with filesystems, server architectures, distributed systems, relational databases and SQL
* Experience with scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript and Bash
* Experience with Terraform, Docker and other infrastructure tools
* Shown ability to independently define project requirements and ship products
* Ability to fill in with front-end engineering (React) where necessary is a plus
* Experience with biomedical science is NOT required. An interest in learning about the space is a plus.