Backend Tech Lead: Scalable, Low-Latency Commerce Systems

Socket.dev; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 174,000 - 252,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a Backend Tech Lead for Unified Commerce Platform (UCP) to scale core serving infrastructure and define standard schemas for agent-to-merchant interactions. You’ll tackle end-to-end commerce journeys across Google surfaces featured in the 2026 I/O Keynote, handling backend scaling challenges and reliability across international markets.

The role focuses on designing scalable systems, mentoring engineers, and delivering high-throughput services for billions of interactions

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience with software development in Java or more programming languages.
• 3 years of experience with developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage or hardware architecture.
• 3 years of experience testing, maintaining, or launching software products, and 1 year of experience with software design and architecture.

Responsibilities

• Write and test product or system development code.
• Design and optimize high-throughput serving systems to drive down latency and maintain high service availability, designing and implementing automated circuit breakers, robust event logging, and granular telemetry.
• Build scalable, automated serving paths for enabling and dynamically routing inventory as merchants ramp up traffic, establishing a highly reliable central source of truth for integration health that downstream systems can depend on.
• Architect backend foundations to support UCP's rapid expansion into new international markets and unlock new structured verticals like groceries and lodging.
• Define the technical goal and backend architecture for UCP's core serving infrastructure, mentoring and guiding a team of backend engineers through complex distributed systems scaling challenges.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

System design

Testing/launching

Architecture

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Master’s degree or PhD in CS or related field

Job description

Google is seeking a Backend Tech Lead for Unified Commerce Platform (UCP) to scale core serving infrastructure and define standard schemas for agent-to-merchant interactions. You’ll tackle end-to-end commerce journeys across Google surfaces featured in the 2026 I/O Keynote, handling backend scaling challenges and reliability across international markets.

The role focuses on designing scalable systems, mentoring engineers, and delivering high-throughput services for billions of interactions