{"id":3801853,"url":"https://alion.io/job/google-staff-software-engineer-agentic-optimization-recursive-self-improvement","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Agentic, Optimization, Recursive Self-Improvement","company":{"id":82,"name":"Google","domain":"google.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/google","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Career site","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":138,"ghost_share":0.043,"stale_share":0.696,"repost_share":0.043,"time_to_fill_p50_days":30,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"DSPy","optional":true},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T09:37:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-05","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T22:44:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About the job\nGoogle'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.\nWe are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help our efforts in Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), Automated Prompt Optimization (APO), and Agentic prompt simplification. We are working towards ensuring that multimodal journeys in Search are fully onboarded onto RSI, and we also motivate horizontal improvements across Search from our learnings.\nIn this role, you will help set and execute the technical direction as part of a strong team for autonomous, closed-loop agentic systems that continuously optimize, compress, and modularize system instructions and agent trajectories-improving instruction-following fidelity, reasoning quality, and inference efficiency at scale.\nIn Google Search, we're reimagining what it means to search for information - any way and anywhere. To do that, we need to solve complex engineering challenges and expand our infrastructure, while maintaining a universally accessible and useful experience that people around the world rely on. In joining the Search team, you'll have an opportunity to make an impact on billions of people globally. \nIndividual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.US: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits\nLearn more about benefits at Google.\nResponsibilities\nPartner with senior leads to architect closed-loop RSI pipelines that autonomously diagnose failure modes, refine instructions/trajectories, synthesize targeted training/eval data, and verify gains without manual intervention.\nInvestigate and build automated multi-agent systems that audit, compress, and de-conflict complex model context-maximizing token efficiency and inference speed while preserving behavioral and safety guardrails.\nBridge inference-time context engineering with model post-training (SFT/RL) to distill complex rules into model weights.\nAdvance automated optimization methods for production multimodal and reasoning systems.\nHelp define the multi-quarter roadmap across Engineering and Research teams, establishing rigorous automated evaluation gates.\nQualifications\nMinimum qualifications:\nBachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.\n8 years of experience in software development.\n5 years of experience with ML design and with LLM/multimodal agent architectures.\nExperience utilizing agentic AI frameworks or developer kits to build and deploy autonomous AI systems.\nExperience in automated LLM evaluation (e.g., LLM-as-a-Judge, multi-turn user simulation, or Pareto optimization).\n\nExperience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows and designing metrics for the AI tools.\nPreferred qualifications:\n8 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.\n3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.\n3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, or cross-business projects.\nExperience building Recursive Self-Improvement, automated prompt, or agent refinement frameworks (e.g., DSPy, OPRO, TextGrad, Reflexion, STaR).\nExperience elevating performance on benchmarks for instruction-following, multimodal reasoning, and agents.\nExperience with prompt compression, structured output enforcement, or context-to-weight distillation.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4263,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":3,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Personal Development","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","Operating Systems","Video & Photo Sharing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-05T11:50:04Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring 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