Staff Software Engineer, AAI Research

Google LLC; Zürich; On-site; CHF 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Google LLC in Zürich, Switzerland, is seeking a software engineer specializing in AI systems and large language models to advance agent-based solutions for Google Cloud. You will work on production-ready, high-performance AI components, collaborating across ML research, product, and engineering teams.

The role emphasizes end-to-end system design, evaluation, and metrics to measure business impact, with a focus on retrieval, context, and function calling in real-world applications.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and building agents.
• Strong Python and ML background.
• Solid understanding of tokens, context, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and function calling.

Responsibilities

• Execute quality iterations on reference agents identifying potential model or agent framework improvements.
• Source or facilitate creation of datasets for evaluation and training to improve model performance for Cloud customers.
• Design new agentic systems and context engineering algorithms, utilizing existing models and identifying the need for new training/evaluation objectives where necessary.
• Define and implement metrics that correspond to business problems.
• Prototype and iterate on the solution working closely with customers, product management and business development.

Skills

Python

LLM experience

Agent/AI systems

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

In most instances, this position requires in-person interviews as part of the hiring process.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and building agents.

Preferred qualifications

• Solid understanding of essential concepts such as tokens, context, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and function calling.
• Solid understanding of core ML concepts, training algorithms, and best practices for evaluation.
• Strong understanding of data and familiarity with basic statistical analysis concepts (e.g., variance, p-value, bias) and general data science principles.
• Familiarity with running quality interactions, involving understanding business goals, defining technical metrics, implementing evaluation frameworks, designing experiments, analyzing results, performing RCAs, formulating hypotheses, and conducting ablation or live experiments.
• Proficiency in Python.

About The Job

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. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google Cloud's needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. You will anticipate our customer needs and be empowered to act like an owner, take action and innovate. 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.

The agent benchmark engineering team drives the discovery and expansion of next-generation agent capabilities, empowering customers to deploy high-performance AI systems.

You will deliver robust, production-ready agentic systems by leading the engineering of the ML quality feedback loop including: hypothesis-driven quality iteration, experimental systems optimization, data engineering for analysis.

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

• Execute quality iterations on reference agents identifying potential model or agent framework improvements.
• Source or facilitate creation of datasets for evaluation and training to improve model performance for Cloud customers.
• Design new agentic systems and context engineering algorithms, utilizing existing models and identifying the need for new training/evaluation objectives where necessary.
• Define and implement metrics that correspond to business problems.
• Prototype and iterate on the solution working closely with customers, product management and business development.

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.