Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About the job

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.

Spanner is a globally distributed relational database service powering most of Google’s products. Cloud Spanner, our cloud native offering on Google Cloud, is a fully managed relational database with unlimited scale, strong consistency, and 99.999% availability.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Cloud Spanner Enterprise team. Our charter is to grow the business by delivering advanced, technically complex distributed systems capabilities for enterprise customers.

In this role, you will contribute to the technical goals and execution of our product, collaborating with product teams and customers to deliver differentiated features that unlock major opportunities for large, global deployments.

We are committed to building teams and supporting career growth while building a high impact differentiator in the relational database space.

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge 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.

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

US: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about

benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and develop mission-critical enterprise features to drive Cloud Spanner's next stage of evolution, engineering distributed database systems that operate at high consistency, low latency, and 99.999% availability.
• Make complex, ambiguous distributed systems problems tractable and help set the long-term technical strategy for your responsible areas.
• Strengthen operational reliability through automation, maintaining rigorous defensive engineering standards for high availability and proactively preventing scaling, security, and compliance bottlenecks.
• Serve as the Subject Matter Expert representing Cloud Spanner with large enterprise customers, external partners, and internal stakeholders (Product Management, Legal, Security), building consensus across adjacent teams with competing priorities to align on technical roadmaps.
• Mentor junior engineers through constructive design reviews, technical guidance, and active sponsorship while fostering a collaborative engineering environment of psychological safety where differing architectural ideas are debated constructively.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages, including C++, and with data structures or algorithms.
• 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.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

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.
• Experience with database internals (e.g., storage engines, distributed transactions, concurrency control, query execution) and diagnosing complex issues such as memory leaks, data corruption, and database performance tuning.
• Experience designing and operating mission-critical, high-availability (HA), or disaster recovery (DR) systems at scale.
• Experience taking new enterprise or cloud infrastructure products from 0-to-1 through post-launch operational cycles for large enterprise customers.