Staff SRE Software Engineer, Google Home

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

Job summary

Google in San Francisco is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help build and run large-scale, massively distributed, fault-tolerant systems. You will focus on reliability, uptime, and performance for Google Cloud services, collaborating with teams to design scalable backends and automate operations.

The role emphasizes problem solving, curiosity, and mentorship in a diverse, blame-free culture, with opportunities to influence architecture, improve ML serving, and contribute to

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience at software development in one or more programming languages.
• 3 years of experience leading projects.
• 3 years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services—from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Define the technical outlook, architectural roadmap, and reliability strategy for Home SRE.

Skills

Software development experience

Project leadership

Distributed systems design/analysis

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in CS/Engineering or related field

Job description

Applicants in San Francisco: Qualified applications with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.

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.
• 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, or a related field.
• Experience architecting complex client-to-cloud telemetry systems, CUJ monitoring frameworks, or semantic quality evaluation pipelines.
• Expertise in ML model serving infrastructure, real-time low-latency streaming systems, or distributed IoT communication protocols.
• Track record of driving cross-functional architectural alignment and influencing technical decisions across large engineering organizations.

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.

Home SRE engineers the reliability, performance, and scalability behind Google Home, powering ambient experiences across more than 100 million connected devices worldwide. Google Home is in the midst of rapid product evolution and high momentum, driven by major software breakthroughs like Gemini for Home alongside a continuous pipeline of recent and upcoming hardware launches.

Our team operates at the unique intersection of physical hardware, distributed cloud infrastructure, and next-generation real-time Voice AI. We focus on high-leverage architectural engagements—partnering closely with development teams to simplify core backends, optimize ML serving, and ensure smart home interactions are instant, reliable, and trustworthy.

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.

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services—from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Define the technical outlook, architectural roadmap, and reliability strategy for Home SRE.

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.