Software Engineering Manager, Search Live Quality, Google Search

About the job

To make interacting with Google Search as natural, fluid and trustworthy as talking with a knowledgeable expert. Search live combines the latest models from DeepMind with the world's information in search. Our goal is for everyone to explore all questions, complex and simple, through live voice and camera conversations, making search live the best conversational knowledge agent and the future of how people interact with Google Search.

As the Engineering Manager for Search Live Quality, you will lead the team that builds and ships the quality improvements behind every search live conversation. The team defines what a great, fluid conversation is and owns the full quality loop: prompts, model turn-ups, evals and autoraters, training data to DeepMind, and improving from online user signals. Its work ships to users within weeks. You will lead exceptional Tech Leads (TLs) and Engineers in Mountain View and New York as one cohesive, high-velocity team. Reporting to the search live engineering lead, you will own the execution of the quality roadmap and partner with the search live quality Area Tech Lead (ATL) to shape the technical direction. Beyond the team, you will work closely with DeepMind and the search live product teams, setting up the team structure and processes that make this partnership work efficiently. The result is a tight quality loop: search live's quality insights and data lead to better models, and better models lead to better experiences for users.

Join Google Search AI and work at the intersection of industry leading

global scale. We apply breakthrough research, leveraging models like Gemini, to launch high-impact products that help billions ask any question and get things done. If you want to drive the future of AI in Search and work with world-class experts to deliver tangible, global impact and continuous innovation, this is the place.

US: $262000 - $364000 (USD) + 25% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Own roadmap execution, turn quality strategy into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), quarterly plans and milestones, track delivery and manage cross-team dependencies and trade-offs, drive quality improvements end-to-end from evals, and human ratings through live experiments to launch.
• Partner with the quality ATL on technical direction, weigh trade-offs, and decide what to build and when.
• Build one team, set clear ownership, operating models and rituals, align priorities and shared tooling/infrastructure with partner teams across sites.
• Develop talent, set clear realistic and ambitious expectations, grow future TLs and managers, run performance, and promotion and hire.
• Drive accountability, assign Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs), hold owners to clear goals and quality metrics, act early on product, timeline and quality risks.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role; overseeing projects.
• 5 years of experience in a people management, supervision/team leadership role.
• 5 years of experience with one or more of the following: speech/audio (e.g., technology duplicating and responding to the human voice), reinforcement learning (e.g., sequential decision making), ML infrastructure, or specialization in another ML field.
• Experience managing both individual contributors and other managers.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 5 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Experience in leading, developing, and growing teams.
• Experience in leading Machine Learning (ML) programs.
• Experience designing and operating distributed computing systems for AI/ML workloads.
• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs).