Staff Backend Software Engineer, Developer Productivity Engineering

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

Software Engineering Mountain View, CA (HQ)

About Tapestry

Tapestry is Alphabet’s moonshot for the electric grid, operating at the convergence of energy infrastructure and advanced AI. Born at X (the innovation engine behind Waymo, Verily, and Google Brain), Tapestry builds computational and analytical platforms that make the world’s power grids visible, predictable, and resilient.

We provide AI-driven planning and simulation tools that allow system operators, utilities, and planners globally to operate more efficiently and integrate clean energy at scale. Tapestry currently collaborates with key partners across the U.S., U.K., Chile, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil.

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead to co-anchor the technical direction, systems architecture, and engineering standards for our Infrastructure and Developer Productivity team.

In this role, you will partner alongside another L6 Tech Lead and the Engineering Manager to set our multi-year platform roadmap. Our systems must process massive amounts of power-grid data, run heavy scientific simulations, and support emerging AI workflows. You will treat our internal infrastructure as a product—building reliable, self-service tools for our developers, automating our delivery pipelines, and creating secure environments where engineers and automated agents can build and test software quickly and safely.

How You Will Make 10X Impact

• Core Cloud & Compute Platform: Architect and operate scalable, multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Ensure efficient compute scheduling and autoscaling across mixed hardware workloads (CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs) supporting simulation and machine learning models. Design resilient networking, IAM boundaries, and secure multi-project cloud environments.
• Developer Velocity & CI/CD: Design fast, hermetic, and automated build, test, and release pipelines that reduce cycle times for product engineers. Provide reliable, on-demand testing environments so teams can validate changes safely before production. Build automated deployment and rollback mechanisms with clear canary verification.
• Infrastructure as Code & Security: Drive declarative, reproducible cloud infrastructure using modern Infrastructure-as-Code (such as Terraform). Implement automated policy checks, secret management, and container vulnerability scanning into standard deployment workflows.
• AI Tooling & Execution Sandboxes: Design secure, isolated sandbox environments that allow automated AI tools and agents to safely run tests and inspect code. Identify high-leverage opportunities to automate repetitive developer workflows using modern AI tools.
• Technical Co-Leadership & Mentorship: Partner with your fellow L6 Tech Lead to split architectural ownership, guide system designs, and run engineering design reviews. Mentor mid-level and senior engineers (L4/L5), raising the technical bar for code reviews, testing, and system design.
• Reliability & Observability: Define team-wide standards for metrics, logs, and distributed tracing to ensure high visibility into production health. Partner with data and ML teams to establish SLAs/SLOs, lead disaster recovery exercises, and run blameless post-mortems.

What You Should Have

• Technical Breadth & Depth: 8+ years of production experience in Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Developer Productivity/Platform Engineering.
• Technical Leadership: 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.
• Modern Cloud & Orchestration: Advanced production-grade expertise with Kubernetes (GKE), container networking, and multi-tenant cloud architectures (Google Cloud Platform preferred).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Deep architectural experience with modern declarative tools (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) managing complex multi-environment cloud footprints.
• CI/CD & Developer Experience Primitives: 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.
• Platform-as-a-Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to interview internal engineering stakeholders, quantify developer friction points, and deliver platforms that measurably increase overall deployment frequency and reduce MTTR.

Preferred Qualifications

• AI & Agentic Workloads: Practical experience designing infrastructure, sandboxes, and execution runtimes specifically geared toward AI agents, LLM evaluations, or high-performance GPU orchestration.
• Data Platform Adjacency: Hands-on architectural exposure to supporting large-scale data platforms (e.g., BigQuery, Spark, Kafka, Ray) or complex distributed simulation environments.
• Alphabet Ecosystem: Working knowledge of Google-internal infrastructure primitives (Borg, Monarch, Spanner, Piper/Blaze) or experience operationalizing an X moonshot into an independent production environment.
• Tier-1 Tech Platform Experience: Background engineering high-throughput platform tooling or developer infrastructure at companies operating at high engineering scale (e.g., Netflix, Snowflake, LinkedIn, Datadog).

Our Values

• Take charge: We take initiative and own outcomes that move the mission forward.
• Transform with purpose: We build solutions that solve real problems and create meaningful impact.
• Be a Tapestry, not a thread: We collaborate across diverse skills and perspectives to achieve more than we can individually.
• Always fine-tune: We stay curious, seek feedback, and refine our understanding as we learn.
• Stay grounded: We listen openly, value different perspectives, and stay focused on what matters most.

What we offer

A culture that supports growth, ownership, and meaningful impact, along with:

• Competitive salary and equity
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Generous PTO and flexible hybrid work model
• 401(k) with employer contribution
• The ability to work on important real-world problems within an Alphabet-backed environment

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $207,000 - $290,000 + bonuses + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, or benefits.

An Equal Opportunity Workplace

At X, we don't just accept difference - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are 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.