Staff Software Engineer, Search Evals

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

• Design, develop, and evolve the core architecture of Search's AI Developer Tools Platform across evaluation infrastructure and high-fidelity queryset pipelines.
• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects.

  Lead initiatives to architect and integrate autonomous agentic workflows into the Search software and prompt development lifecycle, demonstrating and advocating for AI-native engineering practices.

• Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers.
• Drive cross-team technical strategy as a thought leader-collaborating with the wider team and partners to align platform evolution with Search's broader AI architecture.
• Own critical platform areas end-to-end, ensuring they deliver the scalability, reliability, statistical excellence, and low latency required to support 10x AI-driven development velocity across Search.

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 designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability.
• Experience designing and scaling large-scale distributed systems, data/ML pipelines, or developer platforms in C++, Python, Java, or Kotlin.
• Experience with AI/ML evaluation frameworks, LLM/agentic orchestration, autoraters, prompt optimization, or large-scale experimentation infrastructure.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, or cross-business projects.
• Experience in containerization and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
• AI fluency and experience building or leveraging generative AI/agentic tools to accelerate software engineering workflows.
• Ability to articulate, influence, and drive multi-quarter architectural changes across multiple engineering teams, research partners, and cross-functional stakeholders.