Staff Backend Engineer - Platform & AI Tooling Lead

X Development, LLC; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay & equity

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Generous PTO & flexible hybrid work

401(k) with employer contribution

Job summary

Tapestry, Alphabet’s energy-AI initiative, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead in Mountain View to steer the Infrastructure and Developer Productivity platform. You will shape multi-year roadmaps, build reliable self-service tools, and partner with another L6 Tech Lead to raise engineering standards.

You will lead scalable cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and secure IaC practices to accelerate developer velocity while ensuring security and reliability across large-scale data

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production experience in Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Developer Productivity/Platform Engineering.
• 2+ years serving as a formal Tech Lead or Staff Engineer directing the technical roadmap, architectural designs, and execution for a multi-pod or multi-team engineering surface.
• Advanced production-grade expertise with Kubernetes (GKE), container networking, and multi-tenant cloud architectures (Google Cloud Platform preferred).
• Deep architectural experience with modern declarative tools (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) managing complex multi-environment cloud footprints.
• Proven track record building large-scale, automated build/test/release pipelines (e.g., Tekton, GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Bazel) designed around self-service internal developer platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to interview internal engineering stakeholders, quantify developer friction points, and deliver platforms that measurably increase overall deployment frequency and reduce MTTR.

Responsibilities

• Architect and operate scalable multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters on GCP; optimize compute scheduling across CPUs/GPUs/TPUs for simulations and ML.
• Design fast, hermetic, automated build, test, and release pipelines and provide on-demand testing environments.
• Drive declarative, reproducible cloud infrastructure using IaC and implement policy checks, secret management, and vulnerability scanning.
• Design secure, isolated AI tool sandboxes and automate repetitive developer workflows with AI tools.
• Co-lead architectural ownership and mentor engineers (L4/L5).
• Define metrics, logs, tracing standards, and SLAs/SLOs; conduct disaster recovery drills.

Skills

8+ years infra/DevOps

Tech Lead experience

Kubernetes (GKE)

Terraform/Pulumi (IaC)

CI/CD pipelines

Platform-as-a-Product

Tools

GKE

Terraform

Job description

Tapestry, Alphabet’s energy-AI initiative, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead in Mountain View to steer the Infrastructure and Developer Productivity platform. You will shape multi-year roadmaps, build reliable self-service tools, and partner with another L6 Tech Lead to raise engineering standards.

You will lead scalable cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and secure IaC practices to accelerate developer velocity while ensuring security and reliability across large-scale data