Principal Engineer, Data Foundry for AI, Core

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, a similar technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 15 years of professional experience in software engineering.
• Experience developing ML models and infrastructure.
• Experience with one or more relevant domains (e.g., AI/ML, distributed systems, information retrieval, resource optimization) in a cross-functional enterprise.

Preferred qualifications:

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a similar technical field.
• 20 years of professional experience in software engineering.
• Experience with cross-organizational collaboration and influencing other teams' directions and road maps.
• Experience delivering successfully within strict timelines.
• Ability to solve difficult engineering problems with great technical depth.
• Excellent organization, prioritization, and communication skills, in addition to thought leadership to identify and design problems commensurate with Principal Engineer scope and difficulty.

About the job

As the Principal Engineer, you'll provide essential technical oversight over Data Foundry’s Acquisition, Semantic Understanding, and Indexing systems. The stack powers traditional applications like Google Search and, more recently, is being used to acquire, understand, and organize the web and media datasets used to train Google DeepMind’s largest and most sophisticated models. As the Principal Engineer for Data Foundry for AI, you will play a significant role in evolving Information Retrieval’s data acquisition and enrichment capabilities, as well as the Information Retrieval (IR) stack more broadly, towards supporting AI training data applications as a top priority. You'll guide technical decision-making for multiple global/regional teams, comprising 200+ employees. You will also contribute to shaping the long-term direction and strategy for numerous Product Areas/functions, including Search and Google DeepMind.

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $294,000-$414,000 + 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.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Evolve the IR stack to support acquiring, understanding, and building datasets and platforms for AI training applications in GDM (e.g., Gemini, GenMedia, etc.) as a primary use case.
• Lead the evolution of IR infrastructure toward improved usability, reliability, scalability, efficiency, architectural clarity, and coherence with a focus on AI model development journeys.
  
• Mentor and grow IR tech leads, with a particular focus on improving and maintaining system sustainability in an era of quick delivery and bias to action.
• Work across Data, Core, and Google product areas to help define and ensure that IR systems support an AI-driven future.
  
• Work with product management and customer engagement teams to ensure that IR infrastructure supports current and future customer needs, working toward the future state as much as possible given current vantage point.