Software Engineer II, Neural Retrieval

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 1 year of experience with software development in one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, C, C++, Java, JavaScript).
  
• 1 year of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• 1 year of experience implementing core ML concepts.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Experience with training and evaluating AI models (embedding and models).
• Experience developing LLM-based products.
• Experience with model training and eval tools, indexing and serving infrastructure.

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.

As part of Search Platforms, the Neural Retrieval team's mission is to provide possible inputs to Large Language Models (LLM) Search products.
We are working directly with client teams to build Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions that scale across Google, based on the latest LLM advances in embeddings and combining them with structured data approaches (like SQL-based retrieval). The team is looking to harness the power of agents and latest LLM frontier to scale to new domains, while significantly advancing developer speed, quality and cost of retrieving the most helpful content. We are building on top of and working closely with Core IR (Retrieval Engine) and Gemini Encoder Heavy and Embeddings to deliver impact across Search.

Google is an engineering company at heart. We hire people with a broad set of technical skills who are ready to take on some of technology's greatest challenges and make an impact on users around the world. At Google, engineers not only revolutionize search, they routinely work on scalability and storage solutions, large-scale applications and entirely new platforms for developers around the world. From Google Ads to Chrome, Android to YouTube, social to local, Google engineers are changing the world one technological achievement after another.

Responsibilities

• Write product or system development code. Review code developed by other developers and provide feedback to ensure best practices (e.g., style guidelines, checking code in, accuracy, testability, and efficiency).
• Contribute to existing documentation or educational content and adapt content based on product/program updates and user feedback.
• Triage product or system issues and debug/track/resolve by analyzing the sources of issues and the impact on hardware, network, or service operations and quality.
• Improve embedding retrieval quality with better training data, improved and creative recipes.
• Help build a retrieval system that scales to these domains with minimal engineering effort, allows quick evaluation and user facing turnaround time.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.