Staff Software Engineer, Play Games Discovery
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.
- 5 years of experience with one or more of the following: Speech/audio (e.g., technology duplicating and responding to the human voice), reinforcement learning (e.g., sequential decision making), 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 personalization, search quality, or ranking.
Preferred qualifications:
- 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 of building large-scale data pipelines or online serving infrastructure.
- Experience with recommendation systems, ML systems for recommendations or search, or with a background on software or physical storefront.
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.
In this role, you will build personalized experiences for gamers on the Play Store through AI/ML recommendations and helping users know about the latest updates in their favorite games.
Google Play offers music, movies, books, apps and games for devices, powered by the cloud. It syncs across devices and on the web. As part of the Android and Mobile team, Googlers working on Google Play do everything from engineering our backend systems, to shaping product strategy, to forming great content partnerships. They make it possible for people to do things like buy an ebook or song on their Android phone, then have it instantly available on their laptop. The Google Play team enhances the Android ecosystem by giving developers and partners a premium store where they can reach millions of users.
Responsibilities
- Take foundational technical ownership of high risk, ambiguous initiatives (e.g., evaluating native vs. hybrid web architectures, data-passing stacks, and cross-feature telemetry) by owning the deep technical spikes, architectural trade-offs, and complex code reviews.
- Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects. Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.
- Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, outcomes, and timelines. Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers.
- Lead the design and implementation of solutions in specialized ML areas, optimize ML infrastructure, and guide the development of model optimization and data processing strategies.

