Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML, Google Cloud AI at Google
Kirkland, WA
$207,000–$301,000from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Kirkland, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor engineering role focused on designing, building, and optimizing large-scale ML systems within Google Cloud's Applied AI team, which develops products such as customer experience agents and enterprise search. The work involves technical leadership across ML infrastructure, model deployment, and data processing, with cross-functional coordination responsibilities. It suits engineers with deep, specialized ML backgrounds who are comfortable setting technical direction for distributed teams.
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 2 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 240 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 70–430
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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 role is posted for two locations: Sunnyvale, CA and Kirkland, WA. The primary CBSA is reported as San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA; the Kirkland, WA location falls under the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA CBSA (45104).
The 5-year ML specialization requirement is an OR across several domains (speech/audio, reinforcement learning, ML infrastructure, or another ML field). Speech/audio ML is listed as the primary skill with the others captured as alternatives.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience,' which means equivalent experience is accepted in lieu of a degree — treated as no hard degree gate.
Compensation is stated as $207,000–$301,000/year plus a 20% bonus target and equity; the bonus and equity are not captured in the comp range fields.
Gemini and Vertex AI appear only in the 'About the job' narrative describing the team's product portfolio, not in any requirements section.
The alt SOC (15-2051 Data Scientists) reflects the heavy ML/AI specialization emphasis; however, the role's primary framing is large-scale software engineering with ML leadership, making 15-1252 the stronger fit.
The 'Staff' seniority is explicitly stated in the job title and is supported by the requirements: cross-team technical leadership, influencing stakeholders, and setting technical direction across a distributed engineering organization.
Ignored 4 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): software development, ML design, software design and architecture, data structures and algorithms.
Read the full posting
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