Staff Research Engineer, Generative AI, Cloud AI Research, Co-Scientist

Google; Zürich; On-site; CHF 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a Staff Research Software Engineer in Zurich to translate scientific AI research into scalable software systems. You will lead the Co-Scientist team, architect multi-agent reasoning models, and collaborate with researchers across Google and academia.

The role focuses on end-to-end ownership, designing and deploying AI solutions, and mentoring junior engineers within a fast-paced environment at Google Cloud AI Research in Switzerland.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of software development experience including testing and launching software products.
• 3 years optimizing ML infrastructure (deployment, evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 2 years experience with GenAI techniques or GenAI concepts.

Responsibilities

• Own projects end-to-end from initial concepts through design, testing, deployment, and analysis.
• Build and deploy agentic AI systems with multi-agent prompting and task execution.
• Drive technical decisions and full-stack development using Python, C++, and core Google back-end tech.
• Design robust evaluation pipelines, tests, and datasets to measure agent performance at scale.
• Collaborate on research with Google DeepMind, Google Research, and universities; mentor engineers.

Skills

Software development

ML infrastructure

GenAI concepts

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree or PhD

Tools

JAX

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience with software development, including testing and launching software products.
• 3 years of experience optimizing ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 2 years of experience with GenAI techniques (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), Multi-Modal, Large Vision Models) or with GenAI-related concepts (language modeling, computer vision).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree, PhD or Postdoc in Computer Science, Applied Math, Computational Sciences, or a related scientific discipline.
• 3 years of experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., JAX, TensorFlow, PyTorch) and algorithmic background.
• 1 year of experience in a technical leadership role.
• Experience driving independent, research-adjacent software development and translating academic theories into scalable products.
• Record of technical or scientific contributions to complex, large-scale projects.

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.
With your technical expertise you will manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables. You will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.
Co-Scientist is a multi-agent AI system built on Gemini designed to act as an autonomous virtual scientific colleague. It utilises a generate, debate, and evolve approach to accelerate scientific discovery enabling researchers to synthesize literature, evaluate hypotheses, and optimize experimental designs.
As a Staff Research Software Engineer (R-SWE), you will act as a principal technical bridge, translating scientific AI research into robust, scalable, and intuitive software systems. You will lead the design and implementation of highly multi-agent reasoning models while collaborating with deep learning researchers, product managers, and external scientific partners. You will lead software engineering for the Co-Scientist team in Zurich. The Google Cloud AI Research team addresses AI challenges motivated by Google Cloud’s mission of bringing AI to tech, healthcare, finance, retail and many other industries. We work on a range of unique problems focused on research topics that maximize scientific and real-world impact, aiming to push the state-of-the-art in AI and share findings with the broader research community. We also collaborate with product teams to bring innovations to real-world impact that benefits our customers.

Responsibilities

• Own projects end-to-end, from initial scientific research concepts through software design, testing, deployment, and performance analysis.
• Build and deploy agentic AI systems, implementing multi-agent prompting techniques and asynchronous task execution frameworks.
• Drive technical decisions and full-stack software development using Python, C++, and Google's core back-end components.
• Design and establish robust evaluation pipelines, automated test suites, and diagnostic datasets to measure agent performance under extreme scale.
• Collaborate on research with Google DeepMind, Google Research, and university labs to solve complex scientific problems, while mentoring junior engineers and advocating engineering quality.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form .