Senior Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML Embeddings

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 8 years of experience in software development.
  
• 7 years of experience with distributed systems and building large-scale data platforms.
• 7 years of experience leading technical project strategy, ML design, and working with ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 5 years of experience in embedding generation techniques and models (e.g., text, image, and audio).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related technical field.
• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
  
• Experience in designing and implementing vector search and similarity search systems at scale (e.g., using technologies like ScaNN, Faiss, or HNSW).
  
• Experience with cloud storage services and distributed file systems.
  
• Experience building and launching AI-powered platforms or features.

About the job

Google's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. Our products need to handle information at massive scale, and extend well beyond web search. We're looking for engineers who bring fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking and data storage, security, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, UI design and mobile; the list goes on and is growing every day. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google’s needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. We need our engineers to be versatile, display leadership qualities and be enthusiastic to take on new problems across the full-stack as we continue to push technology forward.

This is a unique opportunity to lead the development of Google Cloud’s next-generation intelligent storage layer, a foundational system designed to unlock the semantic meaning of unstructured data. You will be a key leader in one of Google Cloud’s most challenging and high-impact areas, working with a team to handle the massive scale of trillions of objects and exabytes of data. In this role, you will own the entire software development lifecycle, from ideation and architecture to implementation and production deployment. You will design and build a system that moves beyond simple blob storage, enabling users to query their data based on its content, context, and relationships.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000-$349,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the systems for a smart storage platform on top of GCS. This includes scalable pipelines for embedding generation, efficient vector search indexes, and the related platform infrastructure.
  
• Innovate and define new storage APIs and data models that expose semantic understanding to customers.
  
• Solve complex scaling challenges related to handling a massive volume of unstructured data and high-QPS workloads for real-time AI applications.
  
• Collaborate with machine learning experts and researchers to integrate models for data embedding and understanding.
  
• Lead technical design reviews, mentor junior engineers, and drive the overall technical direction for the team.