The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wants to hire one engineer a week to help them save the world

Priscilla Chan and husband Mark Zuckerberg announced their philanthropy in 2015 with a lofty mission to eliminate modern diseases and dramatically increase the rate children can learn. Two years later, the tech leaders are making a serious investment in engineers to help them achieve those goals more quickly.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is on pace to hire one software engineer a week through the rest of the year, Chief Technology Officer Brian Pinkerton said in an interview. In a Facebook post published in October when Pinkerton was hired, Zuckerberg -- the social network’s CEO -- discussed the important role a future Chan Zuckerberg engineering team would play in bringing social change at scale to fields like science and education.

Pinkerton now finds himself recruiting a team of engineers to realize that mission -- to "advance human potential and promote equal opportunity," -- a task that he views as both “daunting” and “exciting.”

“The simple framing of it is just go and knock off disease by disease or go school by school and help them with their computing problems, but there is no leverage in that,” he said. “We are not going to make progress against these giant goals if we are just doing what everyone else is doing so far.”

Pinkerton seeks to hire engineers specializing in security, devops, data visualization and more to build tools that can help both scientists and educators achieve their goals faster. With the acquisition of science search engine Meta just last month, the Initiative hopes to dramatically improve the tools that scientists currently have at their disposal to read papers. To do that, they need Chan Zuckerberg engineers to help revamp Meta’s current website as well as create a mobile app, Pinkerton said. Other notable Chan Zuckerberg investments include a $24 million Series B round in Andela, a startup working to train more software engineers in Africa.

While the tasks ahead for the Chan Zuckerberg engineering team bridge the gap between technology and philanthropy, the Initiative is looking to hiring largely the same talent that most big tech companies in the valley are after. David Plouffe, the Initiative’s President of Policy and Advocacy, said the market for software engineering talent is pretty constrained, but he is bullish that the philanthropy's mission will help recruit the best and brightest. Plouffe, who was most recently Uber’s SVP of Policy and Strategy, added that on recruiting calls it’s apparent that candidates are attracted to the long-term view of the work they will be doing.

There is a lot of pressure to show progress quickly similar to at a tech company, Plouffe said, but there is also some breathing room to think about more long-term problems.

“On some of these projects you are talking about years and in some cases decades,” he said. “That is really interesting to people.”

Plouffe started his career in Washington -- famously running former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign -- before heading west to Silicon Valley and ultimately ending up at Chan Zuckerberg. Given the current political environment and the state of the economy, he said talent on both sides of the aisle might be more seriously considering a career change. “The election revealed what we all knew, that the challenges out there are even more profound than we all thought,” he said. In his mind, Chan Zuckerberg’s efforts to improve access to education across the world are issues that people are starting to feel "real urgency" around to improve economic opportunities.

Since August, Chan Zuckerberg has more than doubled its staff, with roughly 10% of new hires coming from LinkedIn. He is working with a small engineering team now on those efforts, among others, and hopes to grow the team to as many as 75 engineers by the end of the year. Outside of immediate efforts like revamping Meta’s website, Pinkerton hinted that Chan Zuckerberg engineers will be hard at work soon trying to scale personalized learning solutions across the world. Another project will include the Human Cell Atlas, an effort to create a comprehensive reference map of all human cells.

"We believe that we can uniquely contribute by pairing together strong and innovative leaders from engineering and policy with leaders in science and education," Pricilla Chan said in a statement about the new engineering hires. "With our team's ability to think outside of the box, build tools and solve problems, we believe we bring a new contribution to important movements in science and education." 

Update: This article has been updated to include language from Chan Zuckerberg's mission.