Staff Software Engineer, Creativity Foundations, Photos Create

About the job

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.

Google Photos Create team aims for bringing joy to you and those around you, partnering to transform your moments into whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want. The team focuses on bringing Google’s gen media technologies to Google Photos while still giving users the controls to make the photo edits and collages they want, with our goal to deliver a delightful experience for Photos’ billion users to create assets that are easily snackable.

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.
  
• 5 years of experience with full stack development, across back-end such as Java, Python, Golang, or C++ codebases, and front-end experience including JavaScript or TypeScript, HTML, CSS or equivalent.
• 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 and 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.
• Prior experience in launching full-stack mobile product features to consumers.
• Enthusiasm for working on technological innovations and the capability to grow amidst associated ambiguities and challenges.

Responsibilities

• Be an owner and build new creativity features, balancing innovative explorations and usages of gen media technologies and scrappy prototyping in a fast-moving space to find a good product-market fit for our new features.
• Steer both short and long term technical investments in this space, and help set the direction for the team.
• Lead collaboration efforts across Photos to elevate our team and expand the reach and capabilities of our tools.
• Help the team grow full-stack to own features end-to-end.
• Bring DevAI breakthroughs and best practices to elevate the broader engineering team.