Senior Staff Software Engineer, Generative Retail Ad Formats and LLM Applications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages, and with data structures and algorithms.
• 8 years of experience testing, maintaining, or launching software products, and 5 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 8 years of experience with ML/AI algorithms and tools, deep learning or other modeling.
• 7 years of experience leading technical project strategy, ML design, and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 2 years of experience with GenAI (e.g., LLMs, multi-modal, vision models, language modeling, computer vision).

Preferred qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, or related fields.
• Experience in GenAI related model fine tuning, large language models building or product enablement exploration.
• Experience in successfully applying GenAI and machine learning approaches to real-world content problems.
• Deep familiarity with the Search/Shopping/Ads stack, and solid understanding of ML and AI concepts with direct experience applying LLMs in user-facing products.
• Excellent programming skills leveraging GenAI tools, and a strong mindset with extensive experience navigating data-driven decision-making and driving cross-functional alignments.
• Strong mathematical skills with knowledge of statistical methods.

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.

With your technical expertise you will manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables. You will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.

The WebSearch Formats team in Retail Ads owns the end-to-end user experience for Google's flagship shopping ad products on Google.com. We build visual, interactive, and intelligent ad formats to showcase relevant information for billions of shoppers worldwide.

Our full-stack engineering scope spans LLM content generation, evaluation, and serving, as well as system optimizations across the ads quality stack and backend-frontend integration. Partnering closely with stakeholders across Ads, Commerce, and Search, we combine system expertise with generative AI to scale Google’s Retail Ads and build a helpful whole-page shopping experience.

Google Ads is at the forefront of AI innovation, applying cutting-edge machine learning and Generative AI models like Gemini to power a multi-billion dollar global business.

Our work directly impacts billions of users by protecting users from harm, improving ad quality, and optimizing campaigns for advertiser return-on-investment. We foster a culture of deep collaboration, partnering closely with teams like Google Research and DeepMind to solve complex challenges. Join us to work on state-of-the-art AI, take on problems at an unparalleled scale, and build the next generation of advertising technology.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $262000 - $364000 (USD) + 25% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities:

• Address open-ended problems at the frontier of Generative AI and retail ad products — such as how to dynamically compose and personalize ad formats in real time to better serve complex queries and mixed intents.
• Influence organization strategy and prioritization by identifying key areas worth investing in and defining the technical roadmap. Co-define product strategy with cross-functional leadership.
• Work closely with Ads Quality, Commerce, and Search stakeholders across the board. Build deep cross-product area partnerships. Optimize the retail ad products ecosystem end-to-end and optimize the whole page layouts.
• Own the holistic technical architecture. Manage complex, multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives from design through launch; proactively diagnose and resolve cross-system bottlenecks; raise the bar on engineering excellence, experimentation velocity, and production reliability.