The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports global efforts to eradicate infectious diseases and achieve permanent improvements in health. We develop, use, and share computational modeling tools, and promote quantitative decision-making. The IDM team comprises both research scientists and software engineers. IDM has a bold and important vision, and you will play a key role in realizing that vision through the impact you have as a technical leader, as a collaborator, and as a thought partner.

IDM’s software engineering teams are a crucial part of this work, supporting researchers through specialist software development skills, infrastructure services, and workflow tools.

IDM is committed to sharing its work as a public good benefiting the global community of scientists and health-care workers, especially in low-income and low-resource parts of the world. We aim to increase the impact of our work by enabling partners, by growing communities of practice, and by stimulating external contribution and community ownership.

Your Role

We are looking for an expert software engineering leader to manage a team of software engineers providing infrastructure services and workflow tools to researchers.

The Senior Software Engineering Manager (SSEM) for the Computing and Data Infrastructure (CDI) team is a leadership role contributing directly to IDM’s impact. The role calls for capable management of dedicated software engineers; high-quality collaboration with peers in research management to make difficult trade-offs and priority decisions; the ability to work with senior technical staff to conceive, plan, and drive strategic vision in a research setting; and building strong relationships with other teams – particularly the IDM Partner Experience team and the foundation’s Enterprise IT team – to amplify IDM’s impact through effective partner engagement and scalable technology.

Success depends on excellent communication skills; on working transparently and flexibly with research managers; on understanding and addressing the challenges of providing infrastructure services; and on building strong collaborations with other teams in order to extend IDM’s global impact.

You will contribute to decisions about software design and distribution to increase the impact of our modeling software as a global public good. This will involve sophisticated trade-offs over factors that influence the success of shared code. These could include the way code is written, its ease-of-use, run-time requirements, documentation content, and ways to increase community engagement and ownership.

Teams like the one you will lead need to be agile and adaptable. The team needs to be able to swarm to address short-term challenges, but also be able to deliver bigger projects in an iterative and adaptive way, and to explore and prototype new technologies and approaches.

This role reports to the IDM Deputy Director for Software.

What You’ll Do

• Team management and leadership. Be responsible for goal setting and performance management; career direction, coaching, and mentoring; and task management. Set overall strategy and direction for the team.
• Represent IDM strategy and direction in a way that supports your team’s ability to work with autonomy, mastery and purpose.
• Collaborate and coordinate with the foundation’s Enterprise IT team
• Support and collaborate with the CDI team’s Principal Software Engineer in setting technical direction.
• Partner with research managers to understand research goals and challenges, and translate into requirements for infrastructure services and workflow tools.
• Collaborate and negotiate with research managers to prioritize proposed work, align near-term development work with long-term investments, and identify emerging patterns.
• Align software development practices with IDM’s mission and values, including our dedication to open-source software and public goods, and to providing scaleable compute resources to in-country partners in LMIC.
• Collaborate with other software engineering managers to share knowledge and ideas, to promote common practices and technologies, and to coordinate shared deliverables.
• Advocate for flexible and effective software engineering practices that accelerate and facilitate our extraordinary research work.

Your Experience

• We’re looking for people with training and experiences that combine science, software engineering, and software infrastructure, to support the essential relationships for this role: managing the CDI software engineers; partnering with research managers; and collaborating with foundation Enterprise IT. The science background could be a degree or degrees, or could be experience somewhere that does computational science. The software engineering and software infrastructure background could also be some combination of education, training, or experience.
• Extensive track record as a software engineering manager.
• Experience leading software engineering projects for a wide range of user types.
• Experience leading software infrastructure implementation and roll-out projects.
• Experience designing, building, and optimizing for scaleable compute systems, including HPC clusters.
• Understanding and experience of the tools and services commonly associated with software development in research environments. (Such as GitHub, GitHub Actions, Docker, REST, SLURM, DataBricks, Data Lakes, Azure DevOps, etc.).
• Experience crafting, delivering, and supporting software, tools, and services in open-source models, particularly for use in low-resource settings.

*Must be able to legally work in the country where this position is located without visa sponsorship.

The salary range for this role is $182,600 to $283,100 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $199,000 to $308,400 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission and new hires are typically brought into the organization at a salary between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

Hiring Requirements

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Candidate Accommodations

If you require assistance due to a disability in the application or recruitment process, please submit a request here.

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.