Staff Software Engineer, Core, Code Search

About the job

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.

With your technical expertise you will manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables. You will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-year architectural goal and technical roadmap for Google’s Code Search platform across lexical search, real-time incremental indexing, and agentic code discovery.
• Architect, scale, and evolve high-throughput, low-latency indexing and query-serving infrastructure capable of supporting massive repository scale, near-real-time freshness, and rapidly growing workloads from autonomous AI agents.
• Drive technical alignment across organizational boundaries (Developer Infrastructure, AI Agent platforms, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) surfaces, and Research) to land complex, cross-cutting architectural initiatives.
• Mentor and grow senior and junior engineers, setting a high bar for system reliability, performance engineering, and experimental excellence across the team.
• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience building and developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage, or hardware architecture.
• Experience with computer science (e.g., data structures, algorithms, software design).
• Experience in Search and information retrieval.
• Experience with low-level systems programming languages (e.g., C++ or C).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Experience architecting high-throughput, low-latency search, retrieval, or applied AI/ML systems.
• Experience in information retrieval and search infrastructure, including inverted or trigram indices, learning-to-rank, and real-time incremental indexing.
• Experience building retrieval and context-selection systems for LLM-powered coding agents using retrieval evaluation.
• Experience driving technical strategy and alignment across developer infrastructure, machine learning, and product teams.
• Experience exploring technical directions, rapidly prototyping, and evaluating opportunities across latency, freshness, relevance, and token efficiency.