Product Applications Scientist, IDSeq, Science Technology

Job Description

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 the world’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Our mission is to create a future for everyone. Across our three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education and Justice and Opportunity, we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and movement building, to help build 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.

The Opportunity

Our mission is to support science and technology that will help make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Interdisciplinary teams of physicians, biologists, computational scientists, and engineers can expand our understanding of the human body and illness — the very science behind medicine. CZI fosters collaboration between scientists and engineers, develops tools and technologies, and builds support for basic scientific research. Examples of the work CZI Science is supporting include the Human Cell Atlas, a global project to create a complete reference map of all the cells in the human body; and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, an independent nonprofit research hub to bring scientists and engineers together from Stanford, UCSF, UC Berkeley, along with the engineering team from CZI.

By pairing engineers with leaders in our education, science, and justice and opportunity teams, we can bring technology to the table in new ways to help drive solutions. We are uniquely positioned to design, build, and scale software systems to help educators, scientists, and policy experts better address the myriad challenges they face. Our technology team is already helping schools bring personalized learning tools to teachers and schools across the country and supporting scientists around the world as they develop a comprehensive reference atlas of all cells in the human body.

At CZI Science, our Product team focuses on opportunities to deliver and scale value and impact, not revenue. We are seeking an enthusiastic, inquisitive, and versatile Product Applications Scientist who has the capability to help develop and deliver products in all stages of the development cycle to join us.

As a team, we:

• Deliver products that accelerate science
• Identify products that would be underfunded as commercial ventures
• Build communities by collaborating and utilizing technology

You will work closely with a dynamic and collaborative team of scientists, computational biologists, engineers, designers, and user researchers who are focused on supporting the scientific community at-large. Supporting the pillars of funding, convenings, and technology, you will help shape and drive the pillar of technology as CZI grows. You will develop a close pulse on our community, engaging with a global community of forward-thinking and passionate biomedical researchers. Example products that we build and contribute to include:

• IDSeq , a metagenomics platform focused on delivering insights in infectious disease
• Starfish , an open-source image processing framework, enabling access to multiplex image-based transcriptomics analysis
• cellxgene , an open source interactive data explorer for single-cell transcriptomics data
• The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Data Coordination Platform , the central platform to process and serve single cell data to the HCA community, whose mission is to create a comprehensive reference map of all human cells
• Meta , a semantic discovery tool that provides a faster way to understand, organize and explore science through personalized feeds.

You will:

• Develop and deliver innovative resources for onboarding new IDSeq users, training scientists, and build a scientific community around our product applications
• Embed within the IDSeq product team; proxy for scientific users and validate that our products meet their needs
• Work with our scientific networks, collaborators, and partners to ensure that they can successfully utilize IDSeq in their work
• Provide on-site and remote scientific product support
• Be a technical and scientific resource for internal and external partners
• Develop an understanding of the scientific and technical landscape within metagenomics and infectious disease
• When needed, build computational tools and develop scripts to enable the use of CZI products
• Provide community outreach to scientists globally to generate awareness of our products through on-site lab visits, presentations at seminars, meetings, and workshops, demonstrations and video tutorials, community calls and hackathons, and conference attendance

You have

• Hands-on experience in data analysis and programming languages
• Excellent organizational, interpersonal, verbal and written communication skills
• Internal drive for continuous learning and improvement
• Strong drive and commitment to empowering scientists as they adopt new tools and technology
• Experience collaborating with product teams during the entire software development lifecycle
• An understanding of the academic research lifecycle (granting, research, publication)
• Previous experience in engaging with scientists, including working directly with partners or customers in the life sciences
• Experience in genomics, metagenomics, or infectious disease
• Experience with a community-facing CRM and their integration into issue tracking systems