Staff Software Engineer, Persistent Disk Snapshot Team

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.

Persistent Disk (PD) Snapshot team delivers foundational data protection and disaster recovery solutions for Google Cloud’s Persistent Disk (PD). We are responsible for PD Snapshots and Instant Snapshots-critical backup primitives ensuring business continuity for global enterprises. While standard PD Snapshots offer highly durable, geo-redundant storage in Google Cloud Storage (GCS), Instant Snapshots provide ultra-fast, in-place checkpoints for rapid recovery. Our mission is to build the most reliable, scalable, and high-performance data protection infrastructure in the cloud, helping customers seamlessly guard against data loss with minimal downtime.

In this role, you will manage distributed storage and metadata challenges at exabyte scale, directly impacting the reliability and trustworthiness of Google Cloud Platform for millions of users worldwide.Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

Responsibilities

• Act as a critical technical leader setting the strategy, roadmap, and architectural direction for Google Cloud's backup and disaster recovery primitives.
• Be responsible for managing large, highly ambiguous problems where the path forward is unclear, reducing chaos, and building consensus across multiple cross-functional teams.
• Lead the evolution of PD Snapshots and Instant snapshots to support exponential growth, driving multi-quarter initiatives exabyte-scale data routing, metadata isolation, and zero-latency in-place backup mechanisms.
• Be a multiplier who advocates product excellence, drives system reliability, and mentors executive and junior engineers alike to achieve ambitious milestones at global scale.
• Align stakeholders, peer teams, and executive leaders across PD Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Product Manager (PM) on critical design and integration decisions.

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in C++.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products.
• 5 years of experience building and developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage, or hardware architecture.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 8 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Deep proficiency in C++ with advanced expertise in multi-threaded programming, concurrency control, and low-level system optimizations.
• Extensive background in modern cloud storage infrastructure, disaster recovery (DR), data replication protocols, or block storage snapshot methodologies.