Backend Staff Software Engineer, Consumer Colab, Cloud AI

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.

Our team builds and maintains the largest fleet of Jupyter runtimes in the world. This role is focused on driving forward the next generation of AI-centric runtimes and serving infrastructure to drive growth on our partner platforms by focusing on the simple, model agnostic, scalable and performant AI tools. Recently we have made a big push to headless Colab powered by a new agent friendly CLI, and soon to be shipped with a public API and hosted MCP. We want to grow these new offerings which bring challenges to ensure the capacity to expand (hardware and infra problems), develop novel/state of the art abuse detection, and ensure modern AI/agent workloads.

The Google Cloud AI Research team addresses AI challenges motivated by Google Cloud’s mission of bringing AI to tech, healthcare, finance, retail and many other industries. We work on a range of unique problems focused on research topics that maximize scientific and real-world impact, aiming to push the state-of-the-art in AI and share findings with the broader research community. We also collaborate with product teams to bring innovations to real-world impact that benefits our customers.

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

• Develop and maintain infrastructure to access data science runtimes to power runtimes as an AI tool compatible with common agents and works well with our infra - payments, auth, security, abuse, public api, cli, mcp etc.
• Contribute to maintaining the largest fleet of data science runtimes in the world - keeping our ecosystem up to date, our machine fleet up to date and lowering toil to support the fleet.
• Collaborate with the broader Colab teams to design and implement software systems and tools that support the cutting edge AI/ML workflows.
• Contribute to our Tier2 oncall.
• Communicate effectively across engineering and product teams.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 8 years of experience programming in a modern language (C++, Golang, Rust).
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products.
  
• 5 years of experience building and developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage, or hardware architecture.
  
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
  
• 8 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
  
• 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, or cross-business projects.
• Experience with notebook products.

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year