Staff Software Engineer, Knowledge Catalog Search and Discovery

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Work on a specific project critical to Google Cloud's needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as we grow and evolve.
• Anticipate customer needs and act like an owner, taking action and innovating.
• Lead the evolution of the Knowledge Catalog’s search experience, owning the end-to-end ML lifecycle for search relevance.
• Design, prototype, and rapidly test advanced information retrieval techniques to ensure users can intuitively find the exact data assets they need.
• Dive deep into user query logs, click-through data, and catalog metadata to identify relevance gaps, systematically addressing them by training and tuning models that continuously elevate core search metrics like NDCG and precision.
• Collaborate with core catalog engineers to seamlessly integrate your models into our high-throughput indexing and retrieval pipelines, ensuring scalability, robustness, and sub-100ms response times.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with one or more of the following: Speech/audio, reinforcement learning, ML infrastructure, or specialization in another ML field.
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• Experience in modern ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX).

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 8 years of experience with data structures/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, or cross-business projects.
• Experience with modern search architectures, including two-stage retrieval systems (bi-encoders and cross-encoders), semantic search, and vector embeddings.

Skills

Experience in modern ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX).

Benefits

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Sunnyvale, CA, USA; Kirkland, WA, USA.

Pay

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