Senior Software Engineering Manager, GCE Control Plane

Google; Kirkland (WA); On-site; USD 262,000 - 364,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Retirement plan

PTO 20 days

Sick leave

Maternity leave

Baby bonding leave

Paid holidays

Job summary

Google is seeking a Software Engineering Manager in Washington to lead and grow multiple engineering teams focused on scalable, reliable backend systems. You will guide architecture decisions, mentor managers, and own strategic delivery across sites worldwide.

You will drive multi-team initiatives, oversee budgets, and align technical roadmaps with product goals while maintaining strong collaboration with operations and executive stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in C++.
• 7 years building large-scale infrastructure or distributed systems.
• 5 years in technical leadership and people management.

Responsibilities

• Scale high-performing engineering teams to manage foundational infrastructure.
• Foster an environment of reliability by design across platforms.
• Drive blast radius containment, hitless maintenance, and capacity assurance.
• Guide multi-dimensional sharding and disaster recovery for AI workloads.
• Define goals to enhance platform security and automate compliance.

Skills

C++ programming

Large-scale infra

Technical leadership

People management

Distributed systems

Cloud security

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Master's or PhD preferred

Job description

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

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in C++.
• 7 years of experience building and developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage, or hardware architecture.
• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• 5 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Experience managing managers and scaling large, high-performing engineering organizations through periods of growth or technical transformation.
• Deep domain expertise in reliability engineering, automated disaster recovery, or cloud security and compliance within regulated environments.
• Proven ability to demonstrate staff-level technical judgment and decision-making for large-scale back-end systems and complex platform architectures.
• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of partnering with product, operations, and executive stakeholders to drive platform strategy.

About The Job

Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.

With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.

In this role, you will lead the shift to cellular architectures and multi-dimensional sharding to contain deployment blast radius and prevent multi-regional failures. You will shift telemetry to customer-perceived sensitivity, using AI-driven anomaly detection and automated rollbacks to neutralize failures early, and will modernize resource conservation by transitioning to dynamic throttling and adaptive quotas for AI workloads. You will establish continuous, automated validation pipelines to ensure data stores meet strict Recovery Point Objective/Recovery Time Objective (RPO/RTO) objectives and maintain resiliency.

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $262000 - $364000 (USD) + 25% bonus target + equity + benefits

Responsibilities

Learn more about benefits at Google .

• Scale high-performing engineering teams to manage the foundational infrastructure of the GCE Control Plane Platform.
• Build a "Reliable by Design" environment, establishing GCE as the industry gold standard for resiliency against hyper-accelerated AI workloads.
• Foster an engineering culture focused on blast radius containment, hitless maintenance, and dynamic capacity assurance.
• Guide multi-dimensional sharding and automated disaster recovery for a rapidly scaling AI fleet.
• Define the technical goal and lead initiatives to enhance platform security and automate continuous compliance.

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 EOO 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.