Staff Research Engineer - ML & Autonomous Systems

Google; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking an experienced software engineer and researcher in Mountain View to lead foundational research in learning, uncertainty estimation, and autonomous system diagnosis. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to translate breakthroughs into scalable, real-time infrastructure and publish impactful work in top venues.

The role emphasizes leadership in research directions, cross-team collaboration, and contributions to papers and datasets.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of software development experience.
• 6 years leading research agendas or deploying ML models.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (JAX, TensorFlow) and distributed training pipelines.
• Publications submitted to conferences/journals (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICRA, CoRL).

Responsibilities

• Scope, lead, and execute foundational research in learning, uncertainty estimation, and automated system diagnosis to enable robust, adaptive perception and decision-making stacks.
• Develop novel methodologies for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, active learning with demonstrable impact on behavior and semantics, multimodal retrieval, uncertainty quantification, and sensor-to-perception-to-action stack calibration.
• Partner with research leads, software engineers, and product teams to integrate breakthroughs into scalable, (and possibly real-time) autonomous infrastructure.
• Author high-impact papers in premier machine learning, computer vision, and robotics venues, contributing code, models, and datasets where applicable.

Skills

Large-scale software development

Distributed training pipelines

ML frameworks

Publications

Research leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

JAX

TensorFlow

Job description

Google is seeking an experienced software engineer and researcher in Mountain View to lead foundational research in learning, uncertainty estimation, and autonomous system diagnosis. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to translate breakthroughs into scalable, real-time infrastructure and publish impactful work in top venues.

The role emphasizes leadership in research directions, cross-team collaboration, and contributions to papers and datasets.