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 join their Operations team. This role focuses on building internal tools and AI-powered workflows to enhance employee effectiveness. The engineer will set technical direction for the platform, including applications, agents, integrations, and knowledge infrastructure. 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 integration layers.
- 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, including auth, rate limits, schema drift, and 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 and ability to make progress when requirements are evolving.
- Strong stakeholder fluency; ability to 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 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, including custom agents, workflows, and the knowledge and retrieval substrate for reasoning over connected enterprise data.
- Tech-lead a small team: set the design and code review bar, partner with engineers on best practices, and mentor contingent engineering support.
- Partner with senior business stakeholders across the organization 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 for employees who need assistance moving.
- Discretionary annual performance bonus program.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
