Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Products and Systems, Google Photos

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.

As a collaborative Staff Software Engineer, you will help build both our flagship agent features and the engineering foundation behind them. In this role, you will act as a technical anchor for a small, full-stack team—working side-by-side with UX and fellow engineers to take new proactive and background agent projects from early prototypes to live user experiments in weeks rather than quarters. At the same time, you will partner across Photos and Gemini teams to design and own the scalable production backend systems that allow proven experiments to graduate cleanly and run reliably at Google Photos scale.

Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. Photos is one of the most sought after products at Google and is looking for both client-side (web and mobile), with server-side (search, storage, serving) and machine intelligence (learning, computer vision) Software Engineers. We are dedicated to making Google experiences centered around the user.
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

Learn more about benefits at Google (https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/benefits/).

Minimum 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.

Preferred qualifications:

- 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.

- 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.