Google Cloud's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. 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 Cloud's needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. You will anticipate our customer needs and be empowered to act like an owner, take action and innovate. 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.
Google Cloud's Filestore is the foundational, high-performance managed file storage service powering enterprise applications and the next wave of AI/ML and Agentic workloads. Serving thousands of customers with strict durability and ultra-low latency guarantees, Filestore is undergoing a major technical evolution—building next-generation multi-tenant distributed storage engines and deep integrations with Kubernetes and AI orchestration platforms.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Technical Lead, you will serve as a primary architectural lead for critical segments of the Filestore distributed storage stack. You will address distributed systems challenges from first principles: designing lock-free high-throughput data paths, high-density architectures (supporting tens of thousands of shares per instance), dynamic resource management, and sub-millisecond I/O paths. You will partner closely with engineering managers, product leaders, and sister teams across Compute, Networking, and GKE to shape a multi-year technical roadmap, elevate engineering excellence across the site, and mentor executive technical leaders.
Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.
Responsibilities
- Define the multi-year technical goal and architectural roadmap for Filestore's core distributed storage engine, balancing rapid innovation with durability, availability, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Architect and implement high-performance, distributed filesystem backends optimized for emerging AI/ML training, inference, and Agentic workloads requiring massive concurrency, extreme density, and low-latency data access.
- Partner with Product Management, SRE, and adjacent Google Cloud teams (Compute Engine, Kubernetes/GKE, Andromeda Networking, Hardware/TI) to drive technical consensus and solve complex cross-stack integration issues.
- Advocate first-party service reliability by establishing rigorous SLAs/SLIs, system modeling, performance benchmarking, fault injection, and zero-downtime rolling upgrades across global fleets.
- Act as a multiplier by coaching and developing other Tech Leads, fostering a culture of engineering, deep code reviews, and proactive technical debt management.
Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 8 years of experience in the IT Industry with building and developing large-scale infrastructure or distributed systems.
- Experience with software development in one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, C, C++, Java, Javascript).
- Experience with Storage storage, databases, file systems, virtualization, or networking.
- Experience in a technical leadership role.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience in building relevant benchmarks, performance optimization, tuning, and profiling large-scale distributed infrastructure for low latency and high throughput.
- Experience leading large, cross-geography engineering teams, mentoring senior technical talent, and successfully engaging with large-scale enterprise customers. Presenting and driving decision and consensus with senior technical and business leadership.
- Understanding of evolving AI/ML workloads (training, inference, agentic) combined with a proven track record of building highly durable, massive-scale distributed storage systems.
- Strong background in building complex, multi-tenant distributed systems from scratch, with the ability to model and optimize system behavior from first principles.