Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure, Google Chat

Google Cloud's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. 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 Cloud's needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. You will anticipate our customer needs and be empowered to act like an owner, take action and innovate. 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.

In the Workspace ecosystem, you will be at the strategic epicenter for enterprise collaboration, contributing to an evolution from a traditional real-time messaging platform into an intelligent, AI-first command center, driving the transition into the Augmented Chat stage.

In this role, you will be a part of the Chat Backend pillar, which owns the distributed systems and technical foundations that make this exponential scale possible.You will contribute to modernizing the stack, driving massive horizontal transformations of the entire stack with the structural primitives that empower Chat to ship at startup velocity.Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s 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

• Lead product direction and technical design by proposing and driving cross-cutting infrastructure migrations, define and execute the Chat Infrastructure roadmap to eliminate architecture weaknesses and simplify data architecture.
• Act as an organizational catalyst by embedding an AI-first engineering culture, integrating DevAI workflows, creatively multiplying team output, and ruthlessly eliminate friction in the developer loop.
• Build backend primitives that natively empower GenAI features, ensuring the infrastructure supports streaming model outputs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and stateful multi-turn interactions.
• Instill a culture of extreme accountability for system reliability by architecting mechanisms to automatically isolate low-priority workloads from critical real-time paths and eradicate sources of production incidents.
• Drive alignment across Product Managers (PMs), Program Managers (PgMs), and engineering leads across multiple Workspace pillars (Platforms, Identity, Meet).

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.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, a technical related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 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.
• 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, and/or cross-business projects.