Staff Software Engineer, Learning Frontiers

About the job

Team Learning Frontiers' mission is to reimagine learning in the agentic era with frontier and multimodal models by building novel student and teacher experiences grounded in proven learning science. Operating like a nimble 0-to-1 startup within Google, we ideate, prototype, and de-risk step-change experiences across the student journey, backed by research from our Learning Sciences and Pedagogy team. From interactive audio-visual activities to collaborative, gamified learning environments, we partner across Google's flagship product surfaces and product areas to graduate and scale our successful experiments into products that fundamentally impact how students learn.

Learning is the ongoing quest for understanding, and we made it our mission more than 20 years ago to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. The learning landscape is changing, and the Learning and Education team's mission is to help everyone in the world learn anything in the world. We provide the information, tools, and services that help people gain knowledge, fuel curiosity, and prepare for what’s next. We focus our work to add the most value for users to enable learning for school, work, and life. We believe everyone can and should have access to quality learning experiences to reach their full potential.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

• Drive early-stage idea development, blue-sky exploration, and rapid prototyping of novel AI-powered learning experiences, developing research-backed hypotheses and evaluating and measuring impact through live experiments and user studies.
• Explore and push the boundary of AI capabilities to build advanced tools for students and teachers, supported by learning science and pedagogical principles.
• Partner and lead collaborations across Google's flagship product surfaces and product areas to graduate and scale validated educational concepts.
• Influence the team's technical and product direction from zero-to-one concept ideation through iterative experimentation.
• Scope, design, and build agentic features across various frameworks and infrastructure.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C++, Java, Kotlin, or Go.
• 5 years of experience testing and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• Experience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows (e.g., prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation suites, synthetic data generation).

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in learning and education, cognitive science, psychometry, or learning analytics.
• Experience building or leveraging rapid prototyping tech stacks (e.g., cloud-native development, Vercel).
• Multimodal experience across modalities such as audio or video.
• Demonstrated track record thriving in 0-to-1 startup or experimental lab environments, building and owning methodical LLM evaluation suites beyond surface-level proofs of concept.
• Interdisciplinary or hybrid background combining Computer Science with Education, Cognitive Science, Learning Sciences, or Business.