Staff Software Engineer, Authorization Search Infrastructure

About the job

Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.

With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.

In this role, you will lead a group responsible for a critical service at the heart of Google's user-facing products. Your leadership will be essential in protecting user data and upholding the privacy promises our customers expect. In this role, you will be designing for and ensuring strong consistency between application data and access control policies during updates.

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

US: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of approximately 10 software engineers, mentoring and growing technical leads to support an expanded team scope.
• Drive team execution on the Plumber roadmap, ensuring the delivery of high-visibility projects that represent key vice president priorities.
• Lead the multi-year Sharing Placements in Plumber initiative to support Drive’s integration into Spanner.
• Enable future-facing infrastructure capabilities for AI and Cloud, ensuring Plumber meets long-term commitments and helps define the agentic identity space.
• Resolve identified system inefficiencies and eliminate duplicate work across Plumber and Zanzibar to achieve tighter integration.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• Experience in a people management or technical leadership role.
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability.
• Experience in low-level systems programming languages (e.g., C++ or C).
• Experience with one or more storage stacks such as Spanner or Bigtable.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience designing, modifying, and maintaining distributed systems in production environments.
• Experience with batch processing of massive datasets using Flume.
• Experience with C++, data processing systems, backend systems, graph algorithms, and infrastructure.
• Experience managing software engineering teams and developing technical roadmaps for computing infrastructure.
• Experience managing or developing managers.