Staff Software Engineer, Reef Intent Engine

Google•San Jose, CA

11h•$207,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Google’s software engineers develop next-generation technologies used by billions of people and build systems that handle information at massive scale. Engineers work on projects critical to Google, with opportunities to move between teams and projects as the business evolves. The role calls for versatility, leadership, and willingness to tackle problems across the full stack. The Hybrid Cloud Environment team empowers Googlers and AI agents to build faster, safer, and more efficiently on Google Cloud. The team develops and operates Reef, Alphabet’s unified, cloud-native development platform. Reef abstracts infrastructure, security, and financial management so human developers and autonomous coding agents can turn high-level intent into a running, production-ready, compliant Google Cloud environment. The role will support frontier AI teams, including Google DeepMind and Gemini, in building cloud-native applications. The Core team builds and advocates for the design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure underlying Google’s flagship products. It creates central solutions, addresses technical barriers, strengthens existing systems, and influences technical decisions across the company. Individual pay is determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. The stated US compensation is $207,000–$300,000 USD, plus a 20% bonus target, equity, and benefits.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
8 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability.
Experience designing software architecture for applications, including AI/ML systems.
Experience in cloud computing, with a focus on AI/ML, data analytics, or data engineering.
Experience maintaining technical infrastructure for computing environments supporting AI/ML workloads.
Experience with cloud-native architecture and development methodologies, such as modernizing legacy applications, application performance profiling and tuning, and container technology.

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI agent harnesses, MCP servers, LLM evaluation pipelines, or neuro-symbolic systems that verify agent infrastructure actions.
Experience with cloud security governance, autonomous remediation, IAM policy automation, VPC Service Controls, OPA, and asset drift detection.
Experience designing large-scale Cloud FinOps, billing attribution, or automated capacity and waste reclamation systems.
Experience with Google Cloud Platform resource management, multi-organization hierarchies, cloud billing, IAM, VPC-SC, and internal production infrastructure.
Experience converging fragmented internal tooling into cohesive, cloud-native developer platforms.

Responsibilities

Translate high-level developer and agent intent into deterministic, verifiable environments.
Architect fleet-wide drift detection, formal policy verification, and autonomous IAM/security remediation agents across Alphabet’s multi-organization footprint.
Design unified policy and budget decorators so greenfield environments are safe by default and cost-governed at creation without manual reviews.
Build high-scale TrueCost billing attribution, ephemeral environment TTL enforcement, and automated brownfield waste reclamation.
Build evaluation harnesses to benchmark agentic infrastructure actuation.
Mentor engineers and align technical roadmaps.