Senior Systems Development Engineer, Fleet Operations Engineering

Systems Development Engineering (SDE) at Google is a role where you manage services and systems at scale. SDEs creatively put their engineering discipline to use automating the mundane and reducing toil. We don’t just write code to fix bugs, but emphasize the development of tools and solutions that fix classes of problems. We know it’s hard to control what you can’t measure – so we focus on observability: instrumenting first, then turning data into knowledge, and finally knowledge into action. We know that the operational efficiency of Google systems, services, virtual compute environments and the operating systems that power them impact the environment, not just the bottom line. We know that working together we can do more, and that community matters.

Google brings together people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We encourage them to collaborate, think big and take risks in a blame-free environment. We promote self-direction to work on meaningful projects, while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

Together we engineer and build the infrastructure, tools, access and telemetry for systems that enable orchestration of Google-scale services. Come build things that matter.

Join the Fleet Infrastructure Engineering team to build and manage infrastructure systems. We power global operations for Alphabet by scaling operational technology and physical security applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) solutions across Google data centers and corporate offices. We are evolving beyond reactive alerting toward AI-driven ecosystems. If you are passionate about applying systems engineering at scale to solve challenges, join us to redefine fleet operations.

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $163000 - $237000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Address complex, systemic problems in highly ambiguous environments, adapting quickly to changing priorities with a strong sense of ownership and minimal supervision.
• Design, deliver, and troubleshoot robust infrastructure solutions for high-profile internal customers, leveraging deep expertise in operating systems, networking, coding, and automation.
• Monitor fleet health, triage critical service outages, and resolve underlying issues across various environments to maintain hardware and network operations quality.
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying automation opportunities and novel ways to apply AI to everyday operational challenges, establishing centralized documentation and codelabs for these workflows.
• Foster a high-performance team culture by partnering with platform teams to strengthen security controls, setting best practices for AI-driven development, and providing constructive code reviews.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or IT-related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience with systems automation, and with systems design and implementation.
• 5 years of experience with technical infrastructure (e.g., deployment, maintenance, troubleshooting), and with reliability of technical infrastructure.
• Experience in any two of the following areas: Operating Systems, Networking, Scripting and Automation.

Preferred qualifications:

• 5 years of experience working with vendors or customers.
• Experience designing and implementing machine learning operations practices, such as staging telemetry data, tracking anomaly detection models, or configuring performance monitoring dashboards.
• Experience with configuration management and automated orchestration engines for building self-healing system remediations.
• Experience in Terraform and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with the ability to design robust cloud architectures.