Product Manager, Bioinformatics and Single Cell

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.

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.

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.

Product at CZI Science

At CZI Science, our Product team focuses on opportunities to deliver and scale value and impact, not revenue. Our Technology team is seeking an enthusiastic, inquisitive, and versatile Product Manager who has the capability to incubate, resource, and lead products in all stages of the development cycle.

As a team, we:

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

To achieve these goals, you will have the opportunity to work closely with a dynamic and collaborative team of 15 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. Some example products that we build:

• 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
• Meta , a semantic discovery tool that provides a faster way to understand, organize and explore science through personalized feeds

This talented Product Manager will need to have expertise in technical software development and working with data engineering and data science, and embed as a product owner to lead an agile team. They will partner with our internal technical teams to develop a shared understanding of data flows and data consumption to serve computational biologists, bioinformatics engineers, and bench scientists. They will need to build relationships with the scientists doing research, and deliver scalable, valuable product solutions to provide value to the scientific community.

You will

• Deliver valuable, consumable APIs, metadata, and command line tools to scientists who want to evaluate machine learning methods or develop data visualization tools.
• Work with the team to evaluate existing solutions in the single cell scientific space and determine bottlenecks in existing data flows. Help evaluate if there are opportunities to bring some of these methods in-house.
• Lead project planning efforts and drive regular product reviews and demos; lead product requirements focused on user value and stories
• Work with the Single Cell Product lead; visit scientific labs focused on analyzing single-cell data. Deliver software to scientists who may not have access to all of the methods and technologies available to the global computational community
• Assess both commercial and academic landscapes to develop strategy
• Stay current with state-of-the-art scientific and commercial tools in the community, and display leadership in driving knowledge of this information internally and externally

You have

• A strong affinity for our mission: supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century
• 2+ years of product management experience, with the ability to work with products at different stages of product maturity
• Demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and point of view, with an ability to focus on user value and change as you learn from our users and stakeholders
• Experience in working with a team on the software development lifecycle
• Energizing presentation and communication skills, including communication to non-technical stakeholders/collaborators
• Experience working with security, legal, quality, or regulatory stakeholders
• Experience in single cell data, or managing big data products with complex metadata and data types