Engineering Manager, Google Distributed Cloud, Unified Control Plane

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.

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) delivers cloud solutions for large customers in finance, government, and highly regulated industries. As the scale of GDC clusters grows exponentially to support more customers and resources, our underlying control plane architecture must evolve.

Lead the newly formed GDC Unified Control Plane (UCP) team, which is responsible for building the next-generation control plane architecture for GDC. A rare opportunity to address deep, systemic distributed systems challenges—from split-DB control plane state management to large-scale, dependency-aware rollouts. Lay the groundwork that 70+ other engineering teams will build upon, directly enabling the platform's multi-tenant scale, operational stability, and security in isolated environments.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $207,000-$300,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Responsibilities

• Recruit, lead, manage, and grow a dedicated team of high-performing Software Engineers (SWEs).
• Drive the technical goal, execution, and delivery of the GDC UCP pillars, starting with the API Gateway, Controller Software Development Kits (SDK), Lifecycle Management (LCM) integrations, and State Management store.
• Work closely with 70+ Operator Component (OC) owners to facilitate the brownfield migration from raw Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) to the UCP architecture.
• Guide architectural decisions, including technical requirement definitions, system design, testing, and progressive rollout strategies for the control plane.
• Coordinate cross-functional efforts with GCP teams, internal infrastructure teams, and GDC stakeholders to integrate proven Google technologies (e.g., Envoy/ESF, SLM, CCS data patterns) into the air-gapped GDC environment.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 3 years of experience with developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage or hardware architecture.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• 2 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization.