C

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Philanthropic tech foundation funding science, education

Business Systems Analyst - Payroll Systems

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/23/2026
$124k - $170k+ 401(k) Match + Relocation support
Senior
Redwood City, CA, USA
RemoteRemote role; pay ranges outside Redwood City, CA are adjusted by market.
IT OperationsEnterprise Applications

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of hands-on experience configuring Workday, including business processes, reporting, security, integrations, and related tools.
  • Experience designing and implementing payroll applications in a rapidly scaling organization.
  • Deep knowledge of payroll and absence management processes.
  • Ability to identify manual, repetitive, error-prone, or low-value work and translate it into scalable automation, workflow, analytics, or AI-enabled improvement opportunities.
  • Ability to turn complex and ambiguous business needs into clear requirements, user stories, technical specifications, test plans, and implementation roadmaps.
  • Experience with Agile delivery methods, demand management, project planning, and change adoption.
  • Strong understanding of enterprise data management, security, privacy, auditability, and compliance for employee and payroll data.
  • Ability to apply appropriate controls and human review to automated or AI-supported processes.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and ability to build trusted partnerships across Payroll, Finance, Total Rewards, and IT.
  • Ability to explain technical capabilities, trade-offs, and business outcomes to nontechnical audiences.
Responsibilities
  • Build and maintain project timelines, milestones, and dependency maps; develop and manage RACI matrices to clarify ownership across stakeholders; facilitate status meetings, track action items, and keep workstreams on schedule; maintain project artifacts including charters, decision logs, and meeting notes; and proactively surface risks, blockers, and scope changes to leadership.
  • Work with Payroll, Finance, and Total Rewards teams to understand their business needs, pain points, and desired outcomes.
  • Document business requirements, create user stories and use cases, and prioritize requests based on business impact, ease of delivery, return on investment, and compliance.
  • Translate business requirements into technical specifications, considering out-of-the-box and best-practice application configuration options and, where needed, customizations or enhancements.
  • Work with the IT team to develop, test, and deploy solutions; coordinate business-team testing to ensure solutions achieve desired outcomes.
  • Prioritize demand, create project plans, and monitor and communicate progress throughout the project lifecycle.
  • Explain technical and application capabilities to business teams and translate business requirements for technical teams.
  • Learn new features and trends in the Workday ecosystem and recommend potential system enhancements.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience evaluating automation and AI use cases based on business value, feasibility, data readiness, risk, compliance, and measurable outcomes is strongly preferred.

About the company

C

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative channels philanthropy and technology to speed progress in science, education, and community development by funding grants, making strategic investments, and building technology tools. It funds and builds practical tools such as personalized learning platforms and AI-assisted research tools, supports researchers, educators, and communities through grants and partnerships, and manages an endowment. It combines grant-making, investments, and technology development across education, science, and community work, emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration, and uses AI to accelerate discovery while aligning tech with social goals. Its goal is to build a better future by expanding human potential and advancing equality through science, education, and community support.

Company Size

501-1,000

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

$2.9B

Headquarters

Menlo Park, California

Founded

2015

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • TranscriptFormer mapped 112 million cells across 12 species, strengthening CZI's platform moat.
  • January 2026 layoffs removed 70 roles, freeing budget for science hiring and compute.
  • CZI still runs a $1 billion annual budget, sustaining long research timelines.

What critics are saying

  • CZI depends on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta fortune; a 2026-2027 valuation shock squeezes grants.
  • The Primary School closed in June 2026, damaging CZI's education credibility.
  • If Virtual Biology misses therapeutic breakthroughs by 2028, Zuckerberg's philanthropy loses its thesis.

What makes Chan Zuckerberg Initiative unique

  • Biohub unites Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Columbia around frontier biology and AI.
  • April 29, 2026 Virtual Biology Initiative commits $500 million to cell models and datasets.
  • EvolutionaryScale joined Biohub in November 2025, bringing ESM3 expertise and Alex Rives.

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Benefits

  • 401(k) Company Match
  • 401(k) Retirement Plan
  • Paid Vacation
  • Family Planning Benefits
  • Relocation Assistance
  • Mental Health Support
  • Wellness Program
  • Flexible Work Hours
  • Student Loan Assistance
  • Childcare Support

Company News

Business Wire
Oct 19th, 2026
Twelve to Deploy World’s First Industrial-Scale Carbon Transformation Platform

Twelve, the carbon transformation company, is announcing $130 million in Series B and additional funding to scale the engineering, manufacturing, and deploym...

HyperAI
Sep 15th, 2026
Stanford AI maps cell biology across 12 species.

Stanford AI maps cell biology across 12 species. Researchers at Stanford Medicine, in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, have developed two advanced artificial intelligence models that enable comprehensive cross-species mapping of cellular biology. The foundational system, Universal Cell Embedding, paved the way for its successor, TranscriptFormer, a second-generation architecture trained on 112 million cells representing 12 distinct species, including humans, yeast, mice, zebrafish, and sea sponges. The research spans 1.53 billion years of evolutionary history and was detailed in recent publications in Nature and Science. TranscriptFormer operates on a methodology analogous to large language models, processing gene expression profiles rather than text. By training algorithms to predict missing cellular data points, the system constructs a mathematical universal space where cells from any organism can be mapped and compared based on functional similarity. This architecture allows researchers to navigate complex genomic data that exceeds human analytical capacity, transforming how biological information is interpreted. The models deliver immediate utility in evolutionary biology, comparative genomics, and disease research. By quantifying cellular relationships, TranscriptFormer has already resolved longstanding biological questions, such as confirming that sponge choanocytes share a closer genetic relationship to neurons in roundworms and frogs than to previously identified sponge neuroid cells. The system can also accurately identify cell types in untrained species, differentiate between healthy and diseased states, and simulate functional cellular configurations for therapeutic development. Stephen Quake, professor of bioengineering at Stanford Medicine, and Jure Leskovec, professor of computer science, co-led the project alongside Theo Karaletsos of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The work, supported by BioHub and the Arc Institute, represents a foundational shift toward AI-driven biological discovery. Researchers anticipate the platform will serve as a critical instrument for decoding complex cellular mechanisms, accelerating cross-species analysis, and informing next-generation cell-based therapies. This news is intelligently aggregated by AI to deliver industry updates efficiently. It does not constitute opinions or advice.

Fortune
Feb 1st, 2026
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut 70 jobs as the Meta CEO's philanthropy goes all in on mission to 'cure or prevent all disease'

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut 70 jobs as the Meta CEO's philanthropy goes all in on mission to 'cure or prevent all disease' The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is making big changes, and it started 2026 with some job cuts to recalibrate and refocus its efforts on AI-powered biomedical research. The philanthropic organization, formed by Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is cutting about 70 jobs, or roughly 8% of its workforce, a CZI spokesperson confirmed to Fortune. The layoffs happened primarily at the organization's Redwood City headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. In 2025, Zuckerberg and Chan laid the groundwork for remaking their philanthropic organization into one focused on AI-powered biomedical research, and its flagship Biohub network in particular. Their move extends a broader retreat from the couple's earlier push into education and social-justice causes, although they'll continue to make donations to local organizations. "I feel like the science work that we've done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done," Zuckerberg said during an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City in November, according to the Associated Press. "So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward." The couple has dedicated, through the Giving Pledge, to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth. Their massive move also underscores how big donors are racing to back science-heavy, tech-centric projects such as peers like the Gates Foundation. The philanthropy started by Bill and Melinda French Gates will shutter in 2045 and has plans to make a record $9 billion in donations this year while remaining primarily focused on health care and disease research. Why CZI had layoffs and its pivot to Biohub. Because the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has big plans to expand its biomedical and science focus and step a little further back from its original focus areas of education, criminal justice reform, housing, and community development, it now needs employees with expertise in their new coverage areas. While some were able to be assigned to other teams, the organization needed more research-heavy expertise to match the new mission, so some had to be laid off. They received a 60-day notice period and will get a severance package with 16 weeks of base pay, health insurance, and a $10,000 stipend to help with other needs. The layoffs came as part of a decision to concentrate resources on Biohub, a growing network of biomedical research institutes that aims to "cure or prevent all disease," according to Zuckerberg and Chan. It currently operates as a collaborative network of nonprofit research centers, partnering with universities like UC San Francisco, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and Columbia. Biohub is focused on advancing biomedical science, engineering, and artificial intelligence to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases. CZI will continue to hire and grow its team, but with more science-focused roles like researchers, data scientists, computational biologists, and more. Since Biohub's 2016 inception, the couple has donated $4 billion to basic science research, and is on track to double that amount during the next decade, according to the AP. The organization has an operating budget of about $1 billion per year. "We will continue our other philanthropic efforts as well, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will serve as infrastructure and support for our initiatives," the couple wrote in a blog post in November. "There will be many challenges, but we believe that achieving some of humanity's long-term dreams will also come within reach." CZI's shared AI obsession with Meta. Like Zuckerberg's $1.81 trillion tech company Meta, CZI is going all-in on AI-focused research and outcomes. Both his business and philanthropic efforts are now squarely focused on AI, with Meta committed to spending between $115 billion and $135 billion on building "superintelligent" agents for user needs across feeds, ads, and commerce. CZI's Biohub similarly is focused on "frontier AI" and "frontier biology," using large-scale models for virtual cells, immune reprogramming, and disease prediction. With those efforts, Zuckerberg has framed 2026 as AI's transformative year for work at both Meta and CZI. "Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make," Zuckerberg and Chan wrote in the November blog post. "So we're going all in on AI-powered biology for our next chapter."

GenomeWeb
Nov 7th, 2025
CZI Acquires EvolutionaryScale for Biohub

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has acquired EvolutionaryScale, a company focused on AI algorithms for life sciences, as part of a restructuring to form Biohub, a new entity combining CZI Science and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub network. This will be the main philanthropic focus for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. EvolutionaryScale Cofounder Alex Rives will lead science at Biohub. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

RamaOnHealthcare
Jul 24th, 2025
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Introduces New GREmLN Model For Genetics

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative introduces new GREmLN model for genetics.