Senior Research Engineer, Modeling Technology – Global Health

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 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 is comprised of research scientists, software engineers, and strategic planning professionals.

Your Role

The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) at the Gates Foundation is seeking a Senior Research Engineer, Modeling Technology to partner with researchers on complex problems and build and advance the technical solutions behind IDM’s disease modeling and support of model-informed policymaking. This role sits within the Model Frameworks team and reports to the Senior Manager, Model Frameworks. This work is critical to strengthening model-driven decision-making in low-resource settings: deepening scientific rigor, enabling researchers to take on more complex questions, and freeing them to focus on the science rather than on technology, all while holding supporting technology to scientific standards of validity and reproducibility.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborative Problem Solving: Partner closely with researchers to understand complex, open-ended scientific challenges and break them into actionable, structured components. Translate core research needs into tailored technical solutions using rigorous mathematical and computational methods, refining solutions iteratively through tight feedback loops to ensure maximum impact and practical utility.

• Communication & Partnership: Build and maintain trust-based relationships across IDM, the Foundation, and research partners. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and scientific audiences by adapting to distinct partner contexts, securing alignment on strategic technical approaches, and empowering research collaborators to spend less time on execution hurdles and more time advancing science.

• Modeling Technologies: Turn proven solutions into repeatable, reusable capabilities that provide a trusted foundation for IDM research. Determine how best to design these capabilities to maximize their impact to researchers’ work, with a focus on elegant, easy-to-understand solutions that adapt readily across research contexts. Work across IDM’s computational modeling paradigms, including agent-based, compartmental, and statistical approaches.

• Technology Frontiers: Introduce new technological approaches that increase the rigor and speed of science and model-informed decision-making, with an emphasis on AI. Rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging methods, integrating the most promising into IDM’s work. Help shape how IDM applies AI responsibly and effectively.

• Technical Execution: Produce well-designed, well-tested, maintainable code with strong use of modern engineering practice. Effectively use AI development tools to accelerate code development and improve quality. Explore, validate, and communicate emerging engineering practice back to the team.

• Autonomy & Delivery: Independently plan and execute work across concurrent projects, coordinating with teammates to keep deliverables on track with minimal supervision. Communicate proactively when timelines or priorities shift and escalate risks clearly with proposed solutions.

• Team Culture & Growth: Exemplify team culture, DEI norms, and collaborative engineering practice for partners with a broad range of technical capability. Serve as a reliable go-to within the team for technical direction, design reviews, and problem escalation.

Your Experience

• Typically, 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience in scientific programming (e.g., Python, R), ideally involving research software, computational modeling, and cloud-based solutions for data access and processing, or equivalent impact.
• Hands-on experience building with generative AI, including agent design, tool use, and context management, in production or research-grade environments, along with a working grasp of how AI system quality gets measured and improved.
• Knowledge of and hands-on experience with computational modeling, such as agent-based modeling (ABM), compartmental models, or statistical/ML approaches.
• Experience collaborating closely with researchers, applied scientists, or domain experts in global health or public health settings.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver well-tested, maintainable code leveraging modern engineering best practice.
• Ability to work independently on multi-week tasks, communicate tradeoffs clearly to both technical and research audiences, and adapt priorities based on manager and team feedback.

Preferred Experience

• Familiarity with open-source software development practices, including contributions to project, workflows, documentation standards, and community engagement.
• Exposure to cloud-based data and compute platforms used for large-scale analysis or simulation workloads.
• Hands-on experience with production AI system design, such as orchestration across long-running tasks, evaluation harnesses, and guardrails, at a level that could help guide practice for a team.
• Background in epidemiology, computational biology, infectious disease modeling, or scientific computing.
• Proven ability to design adaptable, low-barrier software and data solutions tailored to be used in resource-constrained environments.

Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (e.g. H-1B, O-1, L-1, E, OPT, STEM-OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc.).

The salary range for this role is $190,100 to $294,700 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 $290,100 to $324,100 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically 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.

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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

We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview process—such as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility support—we’re happy to help. Please contact HR@gatesfoundation.org with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs. Requests will be handled confidentially.

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.