Staff Software Engineer, AI Security Engineering, 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 grantmaking, impact investing, and collaboration to help accelerate the pace of progress toward our mission. Our Operations organization provides the support needed to push this work forward. 

Operations consists of our Brand & Communications, Central Tech, Finance, People, Real Estate/Workplace/Events/Facilities/Security (REWFS), Strategy & Operations, 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 AI, Infrastructure and Security team provides technology and security support for CZI and our grantees. We believe that Engineering, IT and Security are most effective when in sync and learning from each other on a daily basis.  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 a Staff Software Engineer, AI Security Engineering on the Central Tech team, you will focus on securing systems to enable the use of AI across the organization by making it safe and easy to incorporate more data and models.  You will work on a collaborative multi-disciplinary team to identify risk/reward tradeoffs and build secure AI solutions.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement secure-by-default infrastructure and services supporting AI/ML workloads.
• Collaborate with AI/ML engineers, data engineers, and platform teams to integrate security best practices.
• Develop or acquire tooling and automation to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities specific to AI environments (e.g., model poisoning, data leakage, adversarial attacks).
• Stay current on AI threat landscapes, compliance standards (e.g., NIST AI RMF, GDPR), and emerging security frameworks for AI/ML systems.
• Leverage and contribute to open source tools and technologies.
• Monitor for and respond to emerging threats to AI/ML systems, and participate in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, encryption, container security, and network security.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on security.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one systems-level language (e.g., Go, Rust, or C++).
• Experience with securing cloud-based and on-prem AI infrastructure.
• A desire to automate systems to minimise human errors.
• Ability to work cross functionally across the organization.
• Nice to have - Background in privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g., differential privacy, federated learning, homomorphic encryption).

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $241,000-$362,000. 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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