Staff AI Research Engineer, Large User Models

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.

The team is part of Google's Core ML organization. As a Staff AI Research Engineer, you will architect the strategy and roadmap for foundation recommender model pre-training. You will own the research agenda, defining and prioritizing experiments to drive continuous model quality within compute constraints. In this role, you will partner with data leads to shape collective roadmaps, ML infrastructure leads to define training framework requirements, and engagement teams to establish evaluation benchmarks.

The AI and Infrastructure team is redefining what’s possible. We empower Google customers with breakthrough capabilities and insights by delivering AI and Infrastructure at unparalleled scale, efficiency, reliability and velocity. Our customers include Googlers, Google Cloud customers, and billions of Google users worldwide.

We're the driving force behind Google's groundbreaking innovations, empowering the development of our cutting-edge AI models, delivering unparalleled computing power to global services, and providing the essential platforms that enable developers to build the future. From software to hardware our teams are shaping the future of world-leading hyperscale computing, with key teams working on the development of our TPUs, Vertex AI for Google Cloud, Google Global Networking, Data Center operations, systems research, and much more.

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

US: $207000 - $301000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term strategy for foundation recommender model pre-training, encompassing both model architecture evolution and future training methodologies.
• Drive a high-velocity research agenda focused on model quality, prioritizing experiments based on compute capacity and researcher bandwidth.
• Partner with ML infrastructure teams to architect training frameworks and ensure the technical ecosystem supports the research and release roadmap.
• Collaborate with data teams to plan data collection for pre-training, setting the standards for data quality to meet foundational model objectives.
• Establish evaluation benchmarks and maintain engaged leaderboards to track progress against baselines and ensure performance.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 8 years of experience in software development.
  
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 2 years of experience in research, leading multiple research efforts and influencing research direction related to foundation models, Large Language Models, etc.
• Experience with transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, T5, GPT, ViT), attention mechanisms, and architectural variations.

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.
  
• 3 years of experience working in an organization involving cross-functional or cross-business projects.
• Experience in publications (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML) or open-source contributions in RecSys, NLP, or multimodal systems.