Senior Staff Engineer, GDC AI Inference Platform at Google
Kirkland, WA
$262,000–$365,000from the description
Jul 15, 2026
Kirkland, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A principal-level engineering role focused on designing and owning the infrastructure that runs large language models and agentic AI systems within Google Distributed Cloud. The work centers on defining the technical roadmap for LLM serving and agent orchestration platforms — including multi-agent coordination, state management, and secure execution environments — while collaborating across research, reliability, and product teams to ship production-grade AI capabilities for enterprise customers.
Staff level · 8+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 4 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 4,100 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 2,150–5,300
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The title is 'Senior Staff Engineer' — Google's leveling places this above Staff and below Principal/Distinguished; it is treated here as Staff-band given the explicit 'Senior Staff' framing and the org-wide technical authority described.
The role is offered at two locations: Sunnyvale, CA and Kirkland, WA. The primary CBSA is reported as San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA (the first-listed location); the Kirkland, WA location falls in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA CBSA (45104).
The programming language requirement lists C++, Java, Python, Kotlin, or Go — these are interchangeable options for a single gate; C++ is listed first and the others are captured as alternatives.
The 'software testing' skill (5 years, testing and launching software products) is a required gate from the Minimum qualifications section, though it names no specific testing framework or tool.
Compensation is stated as $262,000–$365,000 base plus a 25% bonus target and equity; only the base salary range is captured in the comp fields.
Master's or PhD is listed under Preferred qualifications only, so the degree requirement is set to None (Bachelor's or equivalent practical experience is the stated minimum, with 'equivalent practical experience' accepted in lieu).
LLM serving optimizations (disaggregated serving, speculative decoding), Kubernetes, Docker, and agentic AI orchestration experience all appear exclusively under Preferred qualifications.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): software architecture, agentic AI orchestration, ML systems engineering.
Read the full posting
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