Staff Software Engineer, GKE AI Agent Platform

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience in cloud computing and building operating systems.
• Experience delivering in hypergrowth and changing development environments, ideation and innovating technology.
• Experience with operating a cloud product.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in statistical analysis and classical machine learning.
• Experience in contributing to open source software.
• Understanding of building solutions or contributing to Kubernetes.
• Ability to possess a developed technical perspective and architecture and system design.
• Track record of building Machine Learning (ML) or Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) agentic platform.

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.

As a key technical leader, you will be at the forefront of the agentic AI revolution, responsible for building the foundational platform that will power the next generation of intelligent systems. You will have a broad scope of influence, from core orchestration technology to the high-level system design for large-scale reinforcement learning. This position requires a blend of technical expertise and a passion for creating systems that empower developers worldwide. Your work will be pivotal in establishing the industry-leading platform for the most demanding AI workloads.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of a unified Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) architecture supporting both Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning (RLFT) and Agent-Level RL workloads.
• Drive end-to-end performance improvements of the RL step time. Address bottlenecks in sampler inference servers, storage I/O with a focus on low-latency Pod Snapshots, and high-throughput networking for terabyte-scale weight synchronization.
• Oversee cross-team initiatives to build a vertically integrated solution.
• Investigate and prototype foundational GKE capabilities for agent forensics and observability. Evaluate purpose-built AI hardware to create a defensible performance advantage for RL on GKE.
• Establish GKE as the premier platform for the Open Source Software (OSS) AI ecosystem. Publish performance benchmarks and reference architectures for leading Reinforcement Learning (RL) libraries.