Research Engineer, Polaris, DeepMind

At Google, research-focused Software Engineers are embedded throughout the company, allowing them to setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly. Ideas may come from internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world.

From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, engineers work on real-world problems including artificial intelligence, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more. But you stay connected to your research roots as an active contributor to the wider research community by partnering with universities and publishing papers.

Engineers on the Polaris team design tasks that test Gemini’s ability to complete software engineering work. A task is essentially an in-depth examination that evaluates how well Gemini performs in a specific, complex scenario. The primary components of a task are: a prompt that instructs Gemini what to do and a grader or rubric that assigns a numerical score to the model’s attempted solution.

Our team, Polaris, is distinguished primarily by how much manual effort we put into building individual eval tasks. Rather than generating a large number of tasks using a synthetic data pipeline, engineers on the Polaris team prioritize creating a smaller number of tasks that more closely capture the realism and complexity of real-world software engineering. A single well-designed task typically takes a Polaris engineer roughly one week to complete, from the initial ideation stage to final approval.

There are no education or degree requirements for this role. No prior work experience is required.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

Responsibilities

• Create tasks that will be used to measure Gemini’s ability to perform long-horizon software engineering tasks
  
• Evaluate weaknesses of our latest AI models, and develop data and pipelines for improving Gemini

Minimum qualifications:

• Experience using AI coding agents
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience participating in competitive programming, mathematics competitions (e.g., IMO, USAMO, Putnam, or IOI)