Software Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.

With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.

The Drive Storage and File System team owns the foundational backend powering Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Google Workspace. Centered on our globally distributed, multi-region storage and file system built atop Spanner, our systems serve as the authoritative record for trillions of items, exabytes of unstructured data, and millions of queries per second.

Within this ecosystem, you will design and run the core primitives that govern hierarchical file structures, enforce regional storage boundaries for regulatory compliance, execute zero-downtime cross-region data migrations, and support virtual file system routing.

AI will change the future of work in profound ways, and our products— Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Vids and Meet are at the forefront. From pre-computed summaries for email threads, summaries for meetings, and videos created from a document using lifelike AI avatars, our AI opportunity is huge. Our mission is to meaningfully connect people so they can create, build, and grow together and as part of the team you can build how productivity tools should work 5-10 years into the future. You will work with model builders (Google DeepMind), work with exceptional leaders, and have the ability to impact billions of users across the world.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and scale a backend engineering organization, and foster a culture of technical excellence, operational urgency, and clear accountability.
• Define and drive the multi-year technical vision, architectural roadmap, and operational execution for Google Drive's core file system, storage backend, and global data movement systems.
• Advocate modern, AI-first software engineering practices, leveraging agentic development workflows and full-stack hermetic simulation environments to accelerate design iteration, code velocity, and production verification.
• Partner with multiple Technical Leads to unify architectural strategy across interconnected storage and file system workstreams, balancing long-term platform evolution with critical product and compliance deliveries.
• Manage the architecture and production rollout of zero-downtime cross-region data migration pipelines, virtual file system (VFS) routing layers, and regional data isolation capabilities that power global enterprise data residency.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
  
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• 2 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or high-throughput backend infrastructure.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field.
  
• 5 years of experience leading backend or distributed systems engineering teams in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Experience architecting and operating large-scale, high-throughput distributed systems, cloud infrastructure services, or globally distributed database-backed platforms.
• Track record of defining multi-year technical strategy and successfully landing complex, multi-quarter distributed systems changes and architectural evolutions across multiple workstreams without disrupting live production traffic.
• Proven ability to partner with and influence Principal/Staff and engineers and cross-organizational executive stakeholders, while scaling team throughput via AI-accelerated software engineering and automated integration verification.