Job details

Staff Software Engineer, Single-Cell, Science

Founded by 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 society's toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education. Across our core initiatives of Science and Education, we're pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and advocacy, to progress in our mission of building 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.

CZI also supports multiple work options. Learn more about our philosophy and approach here.

The Opportunity

About the Team

Recent advances in Single Cell Biology have created technologies capable of achieving the next grand challenge in biology: the comprehensive characterization of all human tissues at the cellular level. When complete, these references of tissue biology will enable researchers to unlock a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that cause disease at a molecular level which will in turn accelerate the discovery of new drugs to help cure and manage diseases.

The Single Cell Engineering team at CZI develops and builds open-source tools and web applications that enable the reuse of these references by a diverse set of scientific labs. Engineers work on a multidisciplinary team to not only build our products, but also to provide input on the roadmap, to design and lead projects, and to help drive best practices on the team. We value engineers who ask questions and who embrace changing product requirements as we adjust to match the fast-paced field of Single Cell Biology. We work very closely with our grants team to ensure that the tools we build and the grants we give are aligned in strategy to compound our impact.

About the Role

The Single Cell Engineering team is looking for a staff-level software engineer who gets excited about tackling full-stack data optimization challenges that ultimately lead to providing insights into the structure of their data. Our team works very closely with our users, who are scientists working at the cutting edge of computational and experimental biology working with data on tens of millions of cells to understand how genetic variants in cells impact disease risk, define drug toxicities, and discover better therapies. We believe that one of the greatest challenges is to present this vast data visually in a way that accelerates understanding and insights.

The problem we're working on, to which you will be a major contributor, is how to manage the very large data sets as described above, and to create an implementation that will present this data to the end-user scientist. While the specific visualization techniques might be understood, the method of handling the data to create those visualizations for efficient transport to a browser environment is challenging, especially at near-interactive speeds.

Applying deep knowledge of systems design, data structures, and algorithms, you will design and implement improvements to scale our interactive-speed visual data exploration tools that enable scientists to unlock insights from terabytes of high-dimensional, sparse datasets.

You will

Design, build, and optimize data structures and algorithms for our large-scale visualizations to facilitate the reuse of terabytes of single cell transcriptomics data, writing scalable, maintainable, testable systems.
Lead and facilitate discussions of design and software implementation towards decisions, influencing a multidisciplinary group of stakeholders.
Collaborate with Product Managers, Computational Biologists, Designers, and Software Engineers to deliver constant incremental value for scientists without compromising on software quality.
Have opportunities to learn about single cell technologies, though no prior experience is required!

You have

5+ years of relevant software experience
Strong fundamentals in systems design, data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming principles.
Past experience leading efforts to build new features or systems in web- or cloud-based applications.
Past experience doing performance optimization work especially spanning both the browser and server in the context of very large data.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Enthusiasm to ramp up on technologies and learn a new science domain.
Experience working in a multidisciplinary environment (engineering, product, design).

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