About the job

Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.

With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.

The Content Safety team builds critical solutions to protect Google’s global user base from offensive, sensitive, and potentially harmful content.

In this role, you will oversee the development of safety systems for business-critical products including high-business, GenAI-powered experiences across both server-side and on-device platforms. You will blend high-scale distributed systems expertise with deep machine learning (ML) knowledge and sharp product insight. You will design, scale, and maintain a sophisticated safety architecture utilizing rules, blocklists, vector databases, and multimodal understanding models. Your work will directly empower teams across Google to deliver safer, more reliable user experiences at scale.

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

Responsibilities

• Set and communicate team priorities that support the broader organization's goals. Align strategy, processes, and decision-making across teams.

• Set clear expectations with individuals based on their level and role, and align them to the broader organization's goals. Meet regularly with individuals to discuss performance and development and provide feedback and coaching.

• Develop the long-term technical goal and roadmap within, and often beyond, the scope of your teams. Evolve the roadmap to meet anticipated future requirements and infrastructure needs.

• Drive technical project strategy, lead large-scale ML infrastructure optimization, and oversee the design and implementation of solutions across multiple specialized ML areas.

• Be accountable for content safety quality, your work will protect users from exposure to offensive, sensitive or potentially harmful content, and unlock new opportunities for the business.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 8 years of experience with software development.

• 7 years of experience leading technical project strategy, ML design, and optimizing ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).

• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role.

• 5 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

• Experience with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or safety-adjacent fields, such as factuality, or product policy.

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.

• 5 years of experience working in a complex, and matrixed organization.

• Experience in scaling pipelines, deploying global-scale systems, and designing defensive architecture to meet service level objectives (SLOs).

• Ability to be accountable for managing and reducing bug counts and SLO breaches to maintain operational excellence within core user protection.