Senior Technical Program Manager, AI & Product Security, Central Technology

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

Across our work in Science, Education, and within our communities, we pair technology with grant making, impact investing, and collaboration to help accelerate the pace of progress toward our mission. Our Central Operations & Partners team provides the support needed to push this work forward. 

Central Operations & Partners consists of our Brand & Communications, Community, Facilities, Finance, Infrastructure/IT Operations/Business Systems, Initiative Operations, People, Real Estate/Workplace/Facilities/Security, Research & Learning, and Ventures teams. These teams provide the essential operations, services, and strategies needed to support CZI’s progress toward achieving its mission to build a better future for everyone.

Our Central Tech team provides technology and security support for CZI and our grantees. Engineering, IT, and Security are most effective when in sync and learning from each other daily.  Across our three pillars of Infrastructure, Security, and Grantee & Partner Support, we enable our teams to achieve their goals faster and more securely. We leverage technology to automate manual processes, constantly innovate to optimize operations, provide first-class support, and build solutions to enable the scale and execution of our business partners' strategies and initiatives.

The Opportunity

As we engage directly in our communities, we must work from a shared place of trust. We know that our communities care deeply about how information is collected, used, and shared, and so do we. So when CZI builds products, supports grantees, makes venture investments, and purchases services from third parties, we consider their privacy and security at every step.

We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager who will play a critical role in shaping how CZI addresses security and risk in its AI product development landscape. This individual will support complex, cross-functional efforts across technical, legal, and research domains, helping to define and implement security and risk-mitigating strategies for AI models, training and inference workflows, datasets, and developer-facing tools. We are looking for a TPM with a proven track record of building and scaling security or risk-focused programs in technical environments, and of integrating those programs directly into product and development workflows. It is particularly well-suited for individuals who are eager to learn continuously, work across disciplines, and shape security practices in emerging spaces where the rules are still being written.

CZI is shifting rapidly toward developing and sharing AI-powered products, including open-source models, hosted inference tools, and internally-built model training pipelines. These efforts introduce novel risks that cannot be addressed through traditional security approaches alone. As a result, we are rethinking how security is integrated from the earliest stages of model development through to deployment and public release. This role provides the opportunity to work closely with Scientists, Educators, Infrastructure Engineers, Product Experience members, and organizational leaders to evolve security programs that support CZI’s mission while protecting sensitive data, systems, and users. You will help define what “secure” looks like in practice, even when technical guidance or policy precedent does not yet exist. Success in this role requires strong technical fluency, a collaborative mindset, and the ability to provide practical, proactive guidance in environments that are fast-moving, ambiguous, and highly experimental.

What You'll Do

• Be a trusted advisor: Partner with AI product and infrastructure teams to identify potential security risks early, assess them in context, and recommend practical mitigations. Help teams understand security tradeoffs and make informed decisions, while also considering other related risks that affect model safety and responsible deployment.
• Champion secure AI: Collaborate with AI/ML teams to proactively assess and address risks across the model lifecycle. Recommend both technical safeguards and operational processes that are scalable, practical, and suited to the project stage.
• Engage in technical and project-level design discussions: Participate in project-level conversations involving model development, dataset use, tooling, and deployment decisions. Review and respond to architecture, experimentation, and system design proposals. Offer practical, risk-aware input that helps teams understand where security guidance applies and why it matters.
• Implement security best practices for AI development: Work with product and engineering teams to integrate security controls directly into development workflows, making the secure path the most straightforward and sustainable option. Focus on mitigating AI-specific risks such as insecure access, model misuse, data corruption or leakage, and unintended outputs through secure design and risk-informed planning.
• Contribute to shared practices and tools: Help shape and maintain internal policies, templates, and systems that support consistent and flexible adoption of security best practices across diverse teams and workflows.
• Participate in cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, legal, privacy, and product teams to ensure that security efforts are well-coordinated and support CZI’s broader organizational goals.
• Communicate clearly and cross-functionally: Translate complex risks and technical decisions for a variety of audiences, including engineers, legal partners, and leadership. Build trust through clear guidance and support responsible, informed decision-making across teams.

What You'll Bring

• Deep security expertise: 8+ years of experience leading technical security programs or projects, ideally within product, infrastructure, or research environments. Strong preference for candidates with experience partnering closely with engineering or systems teams to drive implementation.
• AI/ML security proficiency: Proven experience supporting AI/ML development from a security perspective, with a solid understanding of common architectures, development workflows, and model types. Ability to reason about risks introduced by both model behavior and data handling.
• Breadth across security domains, including AI-specific risks: Strong working knowledge of core security areas such as secure architecture, access control, and data protection, along with familiarity in AI-specific domains including data pipeline security, model behavior and misuse, and protection of training artifacts and outputs.
• Applied, risk-informed thinking: Demonstrated ability to identify and prioritize risks, define practical mitigations, and integrate security into development workflows. Comfortable offering guidance where formal standards may not yet exist and adapting practices to support iterative, research-driven work.
• Clear and adaptive communication: Proven ability to translate complex risks and tradeoffs for both technical and non-technical audiences, and to align cross-functional teams around shared security goals.
• Pragmatic, collaborative approach: Focus on enabling secure development rather than enforcing checklists. Ability to navigate ambiguity and help teams move forward with clarity and confidence.

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $178,000 - $267,000. 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!

If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.

Explore our work modes, benefits, and interview process at www.chanzuckerberg.com/careers.

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