Senior Technical Program Manager, AI & Product Security, Central Technology (Opens in new window)

Chan Zuckerberg; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 178,000 - 267,000; Full time

Job summary

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative seeks a Senior Technical Program Manager to develop and implement security strategies for AI product development. This pivotal role involves working across technical, legal, and research fields, ensuring secure models, data protection, and collaboration with various teams. Ideal candidates will have over 8 years of experience and a strong command of AI/ML security practices, ready to thrive in a dynamic and evolving environment.

Benefits

Generous 401(k) employer match

Annual benefit for employees

Paid time off to volunteer

Relocation support for Bay Area move

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience leading technical security programs.
• Proven experience supporting AI/ML development from a security perspective.
• Strong working knowledge of core security areas and AI-specific risks.

Responsibilities

• Identify potential security risks early and recommend mitigations.
• Collaborate to assess and address risks across the model lifecycle.
• Implement security best practices for AI development.

Skills

Security expertise

AI/ML security proficiency

Risk-informed thinking

Clear communication

Collaborative approach

Education

8+ years of experience in technical security programs

Job description

Senior Technical Program Manager, AI & Product Security, Central Technology

Redwood City, CA (Open to Flex)

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 grant making, impact investing, and collaboration to help accelerate the pace of progress toward our mission. Our Central Operations & Partners team provides the support needed to push this work forward.

Central Operations & Partners consists of our Brand & Communications, Community, Facilities, Finance, Infrastructure/IT Operations/Business Systems, Initiative Operations, People, Real Estate/Workplace/Facilities/Security, Research & Learning, 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 Central Tech team provides technology and security support for CZI and our grantees. Engineering, IT, and Security are most effective when in sync and learning from each other daily. 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 we engage directly in our communities, we must work from a shared place of trust. We know that our communities care deeply about how information is collected, used, and shared, and so do we. So when CZI builds products, supports grantees, makes venture investments, and purchases services from third parties, we consider their privacy and security at every step.

We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager who will play a critical role in shaping how CZI addresses security and risk in its AI product development landscape. This individual will support complex, cross-functional efforts across technical, legal, and research domains, helping to define and implement security and risk-mitigating strategies for AI models, training and inference workflows, datasets, and developer-facing tools. We are looking for a TPM with a proven track record of building and scaling security or risk-focused programs in technical environments, and of integrating those programs directly into product and development workflows. It is particularly well-suited for individuals who are eager to learn continuously, work across disciplines, and shape security practices in emerging spaces where the rules are still being written.

CZI is shifting rapidly toward developing and sharing AI-powered products, including open-source models, hosted inference tools, and internally-built model training pipelines. These efforts introduce novel risks that cannot be addressed through traditional security approaches alone. As a result, we are rethinking how security is integrated from the earliest stages of model development through to deployment and public release. This role provides the opportunity to work closely with Scientists, Educators, Infrastructure Engineers, Product Experience members, and organizational leaders to evolve security programs that support CZI’s mission while protecting sensitive data, systems, and users. You will help define what “secure” looks like in practice, even when technical guidance or policy precedent does not yet exist. Success in this role requires strong technical fluency, a collaborative mindset, and the ability to provide practical, proactive guidance in environments that are fast-moving, ambiguous, and highly experimental.

What You'll Do

• Be a trusted advisor: Partner with AI product and infrastructure teams to identify potential security risks early, assess them in context, and recommend practical mitigations. Help teams understand security tradeoffs and make informed decisions, while also considering other related risks that affect model safety and responsible deployment.
• Champion secure AI: Collaborate with AI/ML teams to proactively assess and address risks across the model lifecycle. Recommend both technical safeguards and operational processes that are scalable, practical, and suited to the project stage.
• Engage in technical and project-level design discussions: Participate in project-level conversations involving model development, dataset use, tooling, and deployment decisions. Review and respond to architecture, experimentation, and system design proposals. Offer practical, risk-aware input that helps teams understand where security guidance applies and why it matters.
• Implement security best practices for AI development: Work with product and engineering teams to integrate security controls directly into development workflows, making the secure path the most straightforward and sustainable option. Focus on mitigating AI-specific risks such as insecure access, model misuse, data corruption or leakage, and unintended outputs through secure design and risk-informed planning.
• Contribute to shared practices and tools: Help shape and maintain internal policies, templates, and systems that support consistent and flexible adoption of security best practices across diverse teams and workflows.
• Participate in cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, legal, privacy, and product teams to ensure that security efforts are well-coordinated and support CZI’s broader organizational goals.
• Communicate clearly and cross-functionally: Translate complex risks and technical decisions for a variety of audiences, including engineers, legal partners, and leadership. Build trust through clear guidance and support responsible, informed decision-making across teams.

What You'll Bring

• Deep security expertise: 8+ years of experience leading technical security programs or projects, ideally within product, infrastructure, or research environments. Strong preference for candidates with experience partnering closely with engineering or systems teams to drive implementation.
• AI/ML security proficiency: Proven experience supporting AI/ML development from a security perspective, with a solid understanding of common architectures, development workflows, and model types. Ability to reason about risks introduced by both model behavior and data handling.
• Breadth across security domains, including AI-specific risks: Strong working knowledge of core security areas such as secure architecture, access control, and data protection, along with familiarity in AI-specific domains including data pipeline security, model behavior and misuse, and protection of training artifacts and outputs.
• Applied, risk-informed thinking: Demonstrated ability to identify and prioritize risks, define practical mitigations, and integrate security into development workflows. Comfortable offering guidance where formal standards may not yet exist and adapting practices to support iterative, research-driven work.
• Clear and adaptive communication: Proven ability to translate complex risks and tradeoffs for both technical and non-technical audiences, and to align cross-functional teams around shared security goals.
• Pragmatic, collaborative approach: Focus on enabling secure development rather than enforcing checklists. Ability to navigate ambiguity and help teams move forward with clarity and confidence.

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $178,000 - $267,000. 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.
• Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving to the Bay Area

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.

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Enter manually

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

LinkedIn Profile

This role is a hybrid (Open to Flex) role and will require you to be onsite 60% of the working month at our HQ in Redwood City, CA. Will you be able to commit to this? * Select...

Are you currently eligible to work in the United States of America? * Select...

Do you now or in the future require visa sponsorship to continue working in the United States? * Select...

How did you hear about this job? * Select...

If 'Other', please specify how you heard about this job:

Have we met you at one of our events? If so, which one(s)? *

CZI-Sponsored Meetups

CZI-Sponsored Conferences

University Events / Career Fairs

None

Would you like to be invited to our recruiting events and receive information about what is happening at CZI? You’ll have the option to opt out at any time. * Select...

In the last 12 months, have you applied to any organization(s) within the Chan Zuckerberg Science ecosystem? * Select...

We have many exciting career opportunities available, and as part of our collaborative approach, we work with our hiring teams across our wider network to identify talent for our openings. Please opt-in or opt-out here if you would like us to share your profile for other opportunities. * Select...

Reasonable Accommodation and Data Privacy Notice. * Select...

Reasonable Accommodation Notice
CZI provides (and state and federal law requires) reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job (reach out to your recruiter or [e-mail] ). Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

For reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.