Staff Software Engineer – Agentic Features & Scalable AI

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

Job summary

Google Mountain View, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Agentic Products and Systems group within Google Photos. You will work on flagship agent features and the engineering foundation behind them, partnering across Photos and Gemini teams to design scalable production backends that support experiments at Google Photos scale.

As a collaborative Staff Software Engineer, you will act as a technical anchor for a small, full-stack team—working with UX and engineers to take prototypes

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in C++, Java, Python, Kotlin or Go.
• 5 years of experience testing and launching software products.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• Experience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship 0-to-1 agent features end-to-end, including proactive agents that surface timely suggestions to users and long-running background agents that retrieve photos, run goal models item by item, and organize a user's library into dynamic spaces.
• Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, outcomes, and timelines. Coach a distributed team of engineers.
• Partner closely with UX, PM, and teammates to turn rough ideas into working prototypes on real photo data, and collaborate with other Photos and Gemini teams to bring validated features into the main app.
• Design and own the 1-to-100 production backend systems needed to take successful experiments to 100M+ users without a full rewrite, covering async task execution, state streaming, data/byte permissions, and tool/MCP interfaces.
• Work across the client and server stack to ship faster updates to live experiments.

Skills

C++/Java/Python/Kotlin/Go

Testing & launching software

Software design & architecture

Integrating AI tools / LLMs

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Job description

Google Mountain View, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Agentic Products and Systems group within Google Photos. You will work on flagship agent features and the engineering foundation behind them, partnering across Photos and Gemini teams to design scalable production backends that support experiments at Google Photos scale.

As a collaborative Staff Software Engineer, you will act as a technical anchor for a small, full-stack team—working with UX and engineers to take prototypes