Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Semantic Understanding

Google; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is hiring for a Site Reliability Engineer to join the SU SRE team. You will help design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems for Google Cloud, ensuring reliability, uptime, and fast improvement cycles.

The role emphasizes collaboration across teams, automation, and a culture of problem solving, mentorship, and continuous learning. Open to SRE Systems or Software Engineering paths.

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 in applying Design for Reliability techniques.
• 3 years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer.
• 3 years of experience leading projects.
• 3 years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for SU SRE, mentoring team members to enhance reliability.
• Lead large-scale projects to significantly improve reliability, scalability, and performance of SU services.
• Partner with development teams to influence system design and architecture, embedding reliability principles.
• Identify and mitigate risks in production; design architectural improvements for long-term health.
• Participate in on-call rotation, respond to incidents, and drive postmortem actions.

Skills

Software development experience

Reliability design

Site Reliability Engineering

Project leadership

Distributed systems design

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

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 in applying Design for Reliability techniques.
• 3 years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer.
• 3 years of experience leading projects.
• 3 years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Preferred qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering.
• Experience in Generative AI, Generative AI Agent, Google Infrastructure.
• Experience in large-scale and secure fleet management of servers and components.
• Experience in enterprise risk assessments.
• Experience with process improvement and automation.

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 Cloud's services—both our internally critical and our externally-visible systems—have reliability, uptime appropriate to customer's 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 Cloud, 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.

Semantic Understanding Platform (SUP) is the standard platform for hosting image, text, video and data understanding signals at Google. SUP is a unified platform for understanding and generating content, and developing signals from raw data. Our team ensures the reliability, scalability, and operation of several Semantic Understanding Services, which we develop jointly with our partner SWE teams.

This role is open to both Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Systems Engineering and SRE Software Engineering applicants.

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: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Responsibilities

Learn more about benefits at Google.

• Develop and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for critical areas within SU SRE, mentoring team members to enhance system reliability and efficiency.
• Initiate, own, and lead large-scale, complex projects and programs to significantly improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of SU services, often spanning multiple teams and systems.
• Partner with development teams to influence system design and architecture, embedding reliability principles throughout the development life‑cycle. Drive alignment on technical direction across teams, navigating priorities.
• Identify, analyze, and mitigate risks in production. Design and implement architectural improvements to ensure long‑term service health, scalability, and efficiency.
• Participate in the oncall rotation, respond to incidents, and drive postmortem actions to prevent recurrence.

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.