Staff Software Engineer, Beyond Live, DeepMind

At Google DeepMind our mission is to build the world's first general-purpose learning agent. Central to this mission is the complex task of measuring the intelligence of our prototypes. As a Software Engineer, you will be working with the cutting edge AI agents developed by our exceptional team of Machine Learning and Neuroscience research scientists. Your responsibilities will include everything from creating systems for agent testing using 2D and 3D games to developing test problems within physics simulators. You will create graphical visualization of results, build competitive agent leaderboards and test new algorithms on robots. To succeed in this role you will need to have a strong foundation in software engineering and enjoy working on a wide range of challenging problems within a mission-driven team.

In this role, you will shape the future of human-AI interaction with the Beyond Live team. You will design and build the serving platform and core orchestration infrastructure enabling Google's next-generation conversational AI, powering flagship experiences, including partners in Gemini Live, Vertex, Workspace, and more, platform breaks traditional turn-based barriers to support real-time, low-latency, multimodal, and bidirectional communication (streaming audio, video, and text) between users and Gemini models.

As an engineer on our team, you will address systems issues in C++ (mostly), from low-latency streaming and audio/video tokenization to proactive orchestration and multiple-model (e.g., talker/thinker) interactions. You will collaborate closely with DeepMind researchers to translate AI breakthroughs into production services at Google scale. You will build the foundational platform that makes AI agents feel truly conversational and alive, defining the next era of AI assistant technology.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $207000 - $301000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement multi-threaded and multi-system orchestration to manage real-time user-model interactions.
• Optimize end-to-end latency using speculative decoding, audio/video pacing, flow control.
• Manage TPU capacity by tuning model exports and estimating launch footprints to guarantee service reliability.
• Build bidirectional streaming APIs for multimodal inference.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience evaluating and vetting technical designs, feature requests, and code implementations to maintain simple-as-possible, high-quality systems.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, drive alignment on technical direction, and translate experimental features into concrete engineering plans.
• Ability to quickly pivot and adapt to rapid changes in product decisions and research breakthroughs.
• Excellent communication skills, with a track record of effectively collaborating across both research and product client teams.

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: New York, NY, USA; Mountain View, CA, USA; Zürich, Switzerland.