Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Semantic Understanding

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

Job summary

Google is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer for Semantic Understanding in San Jose, CA. The role focuses on reliability and performance of the Semantic Understanding Platform, with a strong emphasis on scalable design and proactive risk management.

You will mentor teams, own outcomes, and drive complex initiatives across multiple squads, balancing innovation with stability in a high-demand cloud environment. English proficiency is required for global collaboration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of software development experience.
• 4 years applying Design for Reliability techniques.
• 3 years of Site Reliability Engineering experience.
• 3 years of leading projects.
• 3 years of designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for critical SU SRE areas, mentoring team members to enhance reliability and efficiency.
• Initiate and lead large-scale, complex projects to improve reliability, scalability, and performance across SU services.
• Partner with development teams to influence system design and architecture, aligning on technical direction across teams.
• Identify, analyze, and mitigate production risks; design architectural improvements for long-term health and efficiency.
• Participate in on-call rotation, respond to incidents, and drive postmortem actions to prevent recurrence.

Skills

SRE

Distributed systems

Leadership

Problem solving

Decision making

Outcomes ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master's degree in CS or Engineering

Job description

Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Semantic Understanding

Share Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Semantic Understanding

Google San Jose, CA, USA

Advanced

Experience owning outcomes and decision making, solving ambiguous problems and influencing stakeholders;deep expertise in domain.

• 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 candidates.

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
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 competing 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 and affirmative action employer. We are committed to building a workforce that is representative of the users we serve, creating a culture of belonging, and providing an equal employment opportunity regardless of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), expecting or parents-to-be, criminal histories consistent with legal requirements, or any other basis protected by law. See also Google's EEO Policy , Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal , Belonging at Google , and How we hire.

Google is a global company and, in order to facilitate efficient collaboration and communication globally, English proficiency is a requirement for all roles unless stated otherwise in the job posting.

Equity is granted exclusively and discretionarily by Alphabet Inc. on the basis of an agreement concluded between you and Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is your sole contractual partner with respect to equity grants. GSU grants are not guaranteed, are discretionary, are subject to approval by the Alphabet Inc. board of directors or its delegate, the terms of the relevant Alphabet Inc. stock plan, and your grant agreement. They have no impact on statutory payments. Current or past grants do not confer an acquired right.