Senior Staff Software Engineer, Internal Tools
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative · Redwood City, CA
$241,000–$331,100from the description
Jul 20, 2026
Redwood City, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor engineering role focused on designing and building internal tools, AI-powered workflows, and the integrations that connect enterprise systems for a philanthropic technology organization. The work spans full-stack application development, cloud infrastructure, custom AI agents, and knowledge retrieval systems. The role suits a deeply experienced engineer comfortable setting technical direction, leading small teams, and engaging directly with senior business stakeholders.
Staff level · 12+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 30 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 6–45
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is titled 'Senior Staff Software Engineer' — advertised at Staff level. The requirements (12+ years, tech-lead IC scope across a function, org-wide technical direction) also support Staff.
The posting explicitly names MCP (Model Context Protocol), LLM tool/function calling, agent frameworks, RAG, vector stores, and knowledge graphs as required fluencies under the 'What You'll Bring' section — all marked as hard gates.
Enterprise IT/business systems background, platform engineering experience, and direct production LLM/agentic workflow experience are listed under 'Nice to have' and are marked preferred accordingly.
The role is hybrid (≥60% onsite, ~3 days/week) at Redwood City, CA — not fully remote. Redwood City falls within the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward CBSA.
The posting mentions possible future management of a small number of engineers, but frames the role as a high-autonomy IC tech lead; the primary day-to-day work is hands-on software engineering.
No specific degree requirement is stated anywhere in the posting.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): full-stack engineering, enterprise IT / business systems, platform engineering.
Read the full posting
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