Software Engineer, Science - #1408368
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Date: 2 days ago
City: Redwood City, CA
Salary:
$153,000
-
$230,000
per year
Contract type: Full time

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.
The Team
CZI supports the science and technology that will make it possible to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century. While this may seem like an audacious goal, in the last 100 years, biomedical science has made tremendous strides in understanding biological systems, advancing human health, and treating disease.
Achieving our mission will only be possible if scientists are able to better understand human biology. To that end, we have identified four grand challenges that will unlock the mysteries of the cell and how cells interact within systems — paving the way for new discoveries that will change medicine in the decades that follow:
The Opportunity
The Data Services team manages and processes scientific datasets specifically designed to enable biological modeling. It is responsible for data validation, wrangling, testing, storage, and retrieval. We handle over 89 million unique cells worth of single cell transcriptomic data, over 15 thousand cryoET tomograms that are in imaging datasets as large as 20TB and counting, and will be expanding to support larger scale and additional imaging, sequencing, and literature modalities. Our resources provide access to open source data that is structured and used by tens of thousands of scientists each month to quickly query and form hypotheses on understanding how genetic variants in cells impact disease risk, define drug toxicities, and eventually discover better therapies.
As a software engineer on the Data Engineering team, you will help implement all the data needs for our platforms, CELLxGENE Discover, CryoET, as well as the new platform we are building that has a focus on data for AI and the virtual cell, in order to enable scientists to further interrogate our very large and growing corpus of data without any need to download the data itself or have any computational expertise. You will work on a collaborative, multidisciplinary team to develop solutions for our scientist users to accelerate their workflows and accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
No prior biology experience is required for this role. You will have the opportunity to pair with Computational Biologists to develop solutions for our users and be able to learn about biology from experts on our team.
Our tech stack: Python, Terraform, AWS infrastructure, TileDB.
What You'll Do
The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $153,000-$230,000. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process.
Benefits For The Whole You
We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.
Explore our work modes, benefits, and interview process at www.chanzuckerberg.com/careers.
The Team
CZI supports the science and technology that will make it possible to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century. While this may seem like an audacious goal, in the last 100 years, biomedical science has made tremendous strides in understanding biological systems, advancing human health, and treating disease.
Achieving our mission will only be possible if scientists are able to better understand human biology. To that end, we have identified four grand challenges that will unlock the mysteries of the cell and how cells interact within systems — paving the way for new discoveries that will change medicine in the decades that follow:
- Building an AI-based virtual cell model to predict and understand cellular behavior
- Developing state-of-the-art imaging systems to observe living cells in action
- Instrumenting tissues to better understand inflammation, a key driver of many diseases
- Engineering and harnessing the immune system for early detection, prevention, and treatment of disease
The Opportunity
The Data Services team manages and processes scientific datasets specifically designed to enable biological modeling. It is responsible for data validation, wrangling, testing, storage, and retrieval. We handle over 89 million unique cells worth of single cell transcriptomic data, over 15 thousand cryoET tomograms that are in imaging datasets as large as 20TB and counting, and will be expanding to support larger scale and additional imaging, sequencing, and literature modalities. Our resources provide access to open source data that is structured and used by tens of thousands of scientists each month to quickly query and form hypotheses on understanding how genetic variants in cells impact disease risk, define drug toxicities, and eventually discover better therapies.
As a software engineer on the Data Engineering team, you will help implement all the data needs for our platforms, CELLxGENE Discover, CryoET, as well as the new platform we are building that has a focus on data for AI and the virtual cell, in order to enable scientists to further interrogate our very large and growing corpus of data without any need to download the data itself or have any computational expertise. You will work on a collaborative, multidisciplinary team to develop solutions for our scientist users to accelerate their workflows and accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
No prior biology experience is required for this role. You will have the opportunity to pair with Computational Biologists to develop solutions for our users and be able to learn about biology from experts on our team.
Our tech stack: Python, Terraform, AWS infrastructure, TileDB.
What You'll Do
- Develop end-to-end, robust data pipelines that seamlessly integrate data ingestion, preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, and deployment.
- Implement scalable data warehousing solutions to handle massive volumes of single-cell transcriptomics data and imaging data.
- Ensure data security and compliance with industry standards and regulations.
- Implement optimization strategies such as data partitioning, indexing, and compression to enhance query performance and reduce computational costs.
- Create user-friendly APIs to enable researchers and scientists to easily access and explore the curated data.
- Enhance the searchability and findability of scientific datasets.
- Develop scalable, maintainable, and testable software systems and participate in team conversations and efforts on engineering excellence.
- Collaborate with product managers, computational biologists, UX designers, and other software engineers to deliver constant incremental value for scientists without compromising on software quality.
- Have opportunities to learn about scientific data and technologies, though no prior experience is required!
- 2+ years of relevant engineering technical experience.
- Understanding of AWS services (S3, RDS, EKS, Batch, etc.)
- Computer Science Engineering degree.
- Strong fundamentals in systems design, data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming principles.
- Proficiency in Python, awareness of scientific computing libraries, such as NumPy and SciPy
- Strong problem solving and analytical skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Enthusiasm to ramp up on technologies and learn a new science domain.
- Must be self-driven and comfortable supporting data needs of multiple systems and products.
The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $153,000-$230,000. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process.
Benefits For The Whole You
We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.
- CZI provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
- Annual benefit for employees that can be used most meaningfully for them and their families, such as housing, student loan repayment, childcare, commuter costs, or other life needs.
- CZI Life of Service Gifts are awarded to employees to “live the mission” and support the causes closest to them.
- 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 to the Bay Area
- And more!
Explore our work modes, benefits, and interview process at www.chanzuckerberg.com/careers.
How to apply
To apply for this job you need to authorize on our website. If you don't have an account yet, please register.
Post a resumeSimilar jobs
Legal Data Engineer
Goodwin,
Redwood City, CA
6 days ago
Join Goodwin’s Global Operations Team, and make a real impact on a global scale. At Goodwin, we work with some of the world’s most successful and innovative investors, entrepreneurs and disruptors in the life sciences, private equity, real estate, technology and financial industries, and where they converge. As part of the Global Operations Team – all business professionals at the...

IP Administrator
Goodwin,
Redwood City, CA
6 days ago
Join Goodwin’s Global Operations Team, and make a real impact on a global scale. At Goodwin, we work with some of the world’s most successful and innovative investors, entrepreneurs and disruptors in the life sciences, private equity, real estate, technology and financial industries, and where they converge. As part of the Global Operations Team – all business professionals at the...

Geriatrics (Per Diem)
The Permanente Medical Group, Inc.,
Redwood City, CA
3 weeks ago
The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. is seeking physicians who are board certified or board eligible by an American Medical Specialty Board. The Permanente Medical Group is committed to cultivating and preserving an inclusive environment for all physicians and employees. We are an equal opportunity employer and VEVRAA federal contractor.
