Senior Staff Software Engineer, Internal Tools
About The Position
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Internal Tools to set the technical direction for their platform. This role involves building internal tools and AI-powered workflows to enhance employee effectiveness. The engineer will be responsible for the applications, agents, integrations, and knowledge infrastructure that streamline back-office work. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact technical lead individual contributor role within a small, focused team. Success will be measured by the adoption of applications, the creation of reusable technical patterns, and maintaining a high engineering bar. The role may evolve to include management of contingent engineering support and a small number of engineers.
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
- 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 senior business partners without a translator
Nice To Haves
- Background in enterprise IT, business systems, or platform engineering
- Experience operating in hub-and-spoke models with embedded engineering teams
- Direct production experience building LLM-based applications, custom agents, or agentic workflows
Responsibilities
- Set technical strategy by defining the architecture and technical roadmap across the stack — applications, AI agents and workflows, integrations, and knowledge infrastructure
- 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 lets them reason 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
Benefits
- 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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
