Staff Software Engineer, Agentic SDLC Foundations

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

Job summary

Google in the United States is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Agentic SDLC Foundations team. You will lead architecture, evaluation, and quality engineering for Google’s developer agent ecosystem, bridging experimental AI prototypes with production-grade autonomous systems and establishing HITL guardrails.

The role emphasizes automated evaluation harnesses, benchmark suites, and reliable agent performance across critical engineering workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• Experience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale production developer agents, establishing patterns for trajectory planning, tool selection, and state recovery.
• Implement intelligent HITL approval gates, intent disambiguation, and graceful to ensure safe execution of actions.
• Architect evaluation pipelines that grade multi-step trajectories, tool-call fidelity, intermediate states, and reasoning paths beyond static input/output matching.
• Establish closed-loop pipelines converting execution failures and human corrections into golden datasets, prompt/tool-schema optimizations, and fine-tuning cycles.
• Curate end-to-end benchmarks replicating complex developer tasks to evaluate agent capabilities and establish standardized Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) across workflows.

Skills

ML design

ML infrastructure

Model deployment

Data processing

Debugging

Fine tuning

Generative AI

LLM interfaces

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Master’s degree

PhD

Job description

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• Experience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• Experience integrating generative AI tools or LLM interfaces into workflows.

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership capacity (e.g., leading technical roadmaps, designing multi-system architectures, and guiding cross-functional engineering efforts).
• Experience designing and implementing AI/ML evaluations, LLM benchmarking frameworks, or agentic quality measurement pipelines.
• Experience in prompt optimization, LLM fine-tuning, automated dataset generation, and trajectory-based evaluation methodologies.
• Experience taking generative AI solutions or autonomous agent loops from prototype to high-reliability production systems.

About the job

As part of the Agentic SDLC organization in Core, our mission is to transform how engineers build, deploy, and manage software at scale by creating an end-to-end agentic platform for the modern software development lifecycle.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Agentic SDLC Foundations team, you will serve as the technical lead driving the architecture, evaluation, and quality engineering of Google’s developer agent ecosystem. Bridging the gap between experimental generative AI prototypes and dependable, production-grade autonomous systems, you will lead the end-to-end technical strategy for building AI solutions with robust human-in-the-loop (HITL) guardrails. You will establish automated evaluation harnesses, benchmark suites, and methodologies that systematically elevate agent reliability, prevent regressions, and standardize key autonomy metrics across Google’s most critical engineering workflows. The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company. 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.

• Design and scale production developer agents, establishing patterns for trajectory planning, tool selection, and state recovery.
• Implement intelligent HITL approval gates, intent disambiguation, and graceful to ensure safe execution of actions.
• Architect evaluation pipelines that grade multi-step trajectories, tool-call fidelity, intermediate states, and reasoning paths beyond static input/output matching.
• Establish closed-loop pipelines converting execution failures and human corrections into golden datasets, prompt/tool-schema optimizations, and fine-tuning cycles.
• Curate end-to-end benchmarks replicating complex developer tasks to evaluate agent capabilities and establish standardized Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) across workflows.

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.