Senior Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Google; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 262,000 - 364,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Sunnyvale to design, build, and operate massively distributed systems ensuring reliability and scalability. You will lead initiatives, optimize performance, and automate operations across critical services.

The role emphasizes software engineering, systems design, and fault-tolerant architectures, with a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous learning. In-person interviews are typically part of the process.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
• 4 years of experience leading projects and providing technical leadership.
• 3 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services—from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.

Skills

Software development

Technical leadership

Distributed systems design

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Job description

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

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
• 4 years of experience leading projects, and providing technical leadership.
• 3 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Preferred qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering.

About The Job

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, fault‑tolerant systems. SRE ensures that Google's services—both our internally critical and our externally‑visible systems—have reliability, uptime appropriate to users' needs and a fast rate of improvement. Additionally SRE’s will keep an ever‑watchful eye on our systems capacity and performance.

Much of our software development focuses on optimizing existing systems, building infrastructure and eliminating work through automation. On the SRE team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges of scale which are unique to Google, while using your expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis and large‑scale system design.

SRE's culture of intellectual curiosity, problem solving and openness is key to its success. Our organization brings together people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We encourage them to collaborate, think big and take risks in a blame‑free environment. We promote self‑direction to work on meaningful projects, while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

To learn more: check out our books on Site Reliability Engineering or read a career profile about why a Software Engineer chose to join SRE.

Behind everything our users see online is the architecture built by the Technical Infrastructure team to keep it running. From developing and maintaining our data centers to building the next generation of Google platforms, we make Google's product portfolio possible. We're proud to be our engineers' engineers and love voiding warranties by taking things apart so we can rebuild them. We keep our networks up and running, ensuring our users have the best and fastest experience possible.

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.

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services—from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.

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.