Senior Software Engineer, Device Architecture, Google Home

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

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus target

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Google Home's System Architecture team defines and validates foundational software architecture across first-party and partner smart home devices. We manage constraints at the boundary of silicon capabilities, embedded OS layers, and real-time processing pipelines.

The Google Home team focuses on hardware, software and services for the home, researching and developing technologies to make homes more helpful.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience in embedded systems, OS internals, or system architecture.
• 5 years of experience in C/C++.
• Experience driving technical requirements, evaluations, and prototyping with silicon and third-party software vendors.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture pathfinding, exploratory investigations, and PoC software implementations to evaluate features and silicon architectures.
• Drive technical engagements and prototyping sprints with external SoC vendors and business partners, evaluating vendor reference software and steering roadmap alignments.
• Profile, diagnose, and optimize system-level resource utilization—specifically targeting DRAM/Flash footprint reduction, CPU load optimization, and end-to-end latency.
• Optimize embedded pipelines for real-time audio/video processing and on-device ML execution, identifying execution bottlenecks across CPU/GPU/NPU subsystems.
• Formulate architectural blueprints and trade-off analyses to influence internal cross-functional teams and external vendor engineering teams.

Skills

Architecture design

PoC prototyping

Vendor engagement

System profiling

C/C++

RTOS/OS internals

Performance optimization

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE/EE or equivalent

Master's degree or PhD preferred

Tools

Perfetto

ftrace

Job description

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience in embedded systems, OS internals, or system architecture.
• 5 years of experience in embedded systems, OS internals, SoC architecture, Linux or RTOS subsystems, device drivers, board bring-up, and low-level system services.
• 5 years of experience in C/C++.
• Experience driving technical requirements, evaluations, and prototyping with silicon and third-party software vendors.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s Degree or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering.
• 5 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• Design experience with consumer hardware SoC architectures (MCU/CPU/DSP/NPU coordination).
• Proficiency in system profiling and tracing tools (e.g., Perfetto, ftrace) to analyze and resolve complex performance bottlenecks.

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.

The System Architecture team within Google Home defines and validates the foundational software architecture across first-party (1P) and partner smart home devices. We manage hard constraints at the boundary of silicon capabilities, embedded operating system (OS) layers, and real-time processing pipelines.

The Google Home team focuses on hardware, software and services offerings for the home, ranging from thermostats to smart displays. The Home team researches, designs, and develops new technologies and hardware to make users’ homes more helpful. Our mission is the helpful home: to create a home that cares for the people inside it and the world around it.Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $174000 - $252000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture pathfinding, exploratory investigations, and proof-of-concept (PoC) software implementations to evaluate features and silicon architectures.
• Drive technical engagements and prototyping sprints with external SoC vendors and business partners, evaluating vendor reference software and steering roadmap alignments.
• Profile, diagnose, and optimize system-level resource utilization—specifically targeting DRAM/Flash footprint reduction, CPU load optimization, and end-to-end latency.
• Optimize embedded pipelines for real-time audio/video processing and on-device ML execution, identifying execution bottlenecks across CPU/GPU/NPU subsystems.
• Formulate architectural blueprints and trade-off analyses to influence internal cross-functional teams (hardware, platform software, Product Management) and external vendor engineering teams.