Staff Software Engineer, Applied Research, Foundation User Models
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
Google's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. Our products need to handle information at massive scale, and extend well beyond web search. We're looking for engineers who bring fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking and data storage, security, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, UI design and mobile; the list goes on and is growing every day. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google's needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. We need our engineers to be versatile, display leadership qualities and be enthusiastic to take on new problems across the full-stack as we continue to push technology forward., * Define and execute the applied research roadmap for the Large User Model ecosystem, balancing immediate customer needs with long-term technical evolution to scale foundational models across high-traffic surfaces.
- Support initiatives with product leadership to translate complex business goals into technical model formulations, delivering step-function improvements in user engagement and business metrics while optimizing for latency and performance trade-offs.
- Optimize model performance by researching and implementing adaptation techniques (transfer learning/domain adaptation) that balances high-quality output with strict inference latency requirements for production environments.
- Drive architectural improvements by establishing a strategic feedback loop with pre-training teams, utilizing downstream performance analysis to influence data curation, model architecture, and novel evaluation metrics for engagement-specific needs.
- Design and productionize fine-tuning pipelines that translate general-purpose state-of-the-art (SoTA) Foundation User Models into effective, domain-specific recommendation engines.
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Requirements
Experience owning outcomes and decision making, solving ambiguous problems and influencing stakeholders; deep expertise in domain., * 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 (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine-tuning).
- Experience with Transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, T5, GPT, ViT), including attention mechanisms and architecture variations., * Master's degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
- 8 years of experience with data structures/algorithms.
- 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
- 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, or cross-business projects.
- Experience of publishing in venues or contributing to open-source projects related to RecSys, transfer learning, NLP/CV, or multimodal systems.
- Understanding of modern recommendation architectures (e.g., two-tower models, sequential user modeling) and how to integrate Large Foundation Models into existing ranking/retrieval stacks.
