Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML, Cloud IAM, Dataset and Model Training

In most instances, this position requires in-person interviews as part of the hiring process.

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.

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, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with one or more of the following: Speech/audio (e.g., technology duplicating and responding to the human voice), reinforcement learning (e.g., sequential decision making), ML infrastructure, or specialization in another ML field.
• 5 years of experience leading ML design and optimizing end-to-end Machine Learning (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).

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.
• 8 years of experience training, fine-tuning, and evaluating machine learning and deep learning models in Python (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, scikit-learn, GBDTs/XGBoost, or Transformers).
• Experience with dataset curation, feature engineering, synthetic data generation, and building reproducible ML training and evaluation pipelines at scale.
• Experience developing ranking, retrieval, classification, or risk/anomaly scoring models for production systems.

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.

On the Google Cloud IAM team, we are building the next generation of intelligent access control to secure a world of AI agents and automated workflows. Our systems understand user intent, recommend least-privilege access, and evaluate risk in real-time, moving beyond the limitations of static permissions. As the technical lead for machine learning, you will architect and build the production models and data pipelines that power these capabilities. You will design solutions spanning information retrieval, risk modeling, and fine-tuned language models, balancing the demands of accuracy, security, and low-latency performance at Google's scale. You will own the end-to-end ML lifecycle, including data curation, benchmark development, and shipping well-calibrated, explainable models into high-reliability services. 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.

• Design and scale training data pipelines using access telemetry, policy graphs, and synthetic data with rigorous de-noising.
• Train and optimize ML models for Intelligent IAM, focusing on access-risk scoring, anomaly detection, and least-privilege recommendations.
• Build explainability and calibration layers to provide clear reasoning for risk scores, routing uncertain cases to human review or static rules.
• Partner with security engineers to identify IAM edge cases, ensuring models learn subtle privilege boundaries without over-granting access.
• Establish evaluation benchmarks and online monitoring to prevent model drift, and optimize models for low-latency Google Cloud serving.

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Sunnyvale, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA.