Product Manager, Infectious Disease

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 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

In our Science Initiative, 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.

Some Science Initiative tools include:
Aspen - an open-source software tool for departments of public health that helps track and slow the spread of infectious disease, including COVID-19 and its new variants
IDseq - an open-source, real-time pathogen detection dashboard for scientists that helps identify and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world
napari - an open-source interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for python
cellxgene - an open-source interactive data explorer for single-cell transcriptomics data

Infectious disease represents 20% of human deaths worldwide. As a Product Manager on the Infectious Disease team, you will have the opportunity to create software products that transform the way that infectious disease is identified, treated, and managed.

The Infectious Disease team has developed two tools for the scientific and public health community:

Aspen
Developed in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Aspen is a software tool for departments of public health to track and manage outbreaks in their local jurisdictions. For example, outbreaks in schools, skilled nursing facilities, factories, and farms. With Aspen, departments of public health can use genomic epidemiology to identify the potential source and transmission of an outbreak, and then take measured steps to contain the spread of disease. Today Aspen is focused on COVID-19 and its new variants, but, in the near future, will also be used for tracking and managing other infectious diseases of concern such as tuberculosis.

IDseq

Long before COVID-19, infectious disease has been a priority for scientists and public health experts around the world. IDseq was developed to provide a platform for scientists to leverage the power of metagenomics sequencing to identify disease agents in their populations and detect outbreaks early. By hosting this no-code tool for free in the cloud, IDseq aims to democratize use of this technology, empowering scientists around the world to reduce the threat of infectious disease at scale. You can read about how IDseq has helped scientists in Bangladesh determine the cause of a meningitis outbreak , and researchers in Cambodia confirm the country’s first case of COVID-19 .

You will

• Help to shape and execute the product vision and strategy for CZI’s Infectious Disease products.
• Iteratively build features that enable scientists to identify and track infectious disease, working closely alongside our team of engineers, designers, user experience researchers, computational biologists, and application scientists.
• Integrate insights from usability studies, research, and market analysis into product requirements.
• Build, maintain, and communicate a prioritized roadmap to support the team’s strategic goals.
• Collaborate and partner cross functionally to ensure that product plans represent user needs, are feasible and viable, and are based on sound judgment, data, and a deep understanding of the user community.
• Work closely with our cross-functional internal team and partners at the CZ Biohub to understand problems and discover and test new solutions.
• Evangelize the value of our products to internal and external stakeholders by defining, tracking and reporting on metrics.
• Participate in half-yearly planning sessions to define objectives and key results, identify resourcing needs, and prioritize project

You have

• Strong affinity for CZI Science’s 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 or equivalent experience, with the ability to work with products at early stages of product maturity.
• Collaborate and communicate effectively with a diverse set of cross-functional teammates and partners (internal and external). Able to hear divergent perspectives and drive towards alignment.
• Demonstrate a user focused and value driven approach, with an ability to focus on user discovery and product delivery.
• Have a firm understanding of the software development lifecycle including agile/scrum.
• Energizing presentation and communication skills, including communication to non-technical stakeholders/collaborators.
• Experience developing cloud- and/or data interpretation-based products and technologies (preferred).
• Experience in managing products with complex metadata and data types (preferred).
• Experience with genomic next-sequencing and/or infectious disease (preferred).

CZI believes that vaccines are one of the most powerful tools to fight COVID-19 and save lives. It aligns to our mission and work to cure, manage, and prevent disease. Proof of completed COVID-19 vaccination will be required for all applicants and employees to come onsite to a CZI facility. CZI will consider exceptions to this policy for medical or religious reasons on an individualized basis.