info_outline XIn accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include: Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks Holidays: 13 paid days per year Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Sunnyvale, CA, USA; Kirkland, WA, USA. Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience. 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages. 3 years of experience testing, maintaining, or launching software products, and 1 year of experience with software design and architecture. 3 years of experience with developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or networks, or experience with compute technologies, storage or hardware architecture. Preferred qualifications: Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, or a related technical field. 5 years of experience with data structures and algorithms. Experience developing accessible technologies. Experience with ML/speech model serving, streaming RPC systems (e.g., gRPC), or public API infrastructure. Experience with large-scale, low-latency, high-QPS serving systems and owning services on production on-call. 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 a Senior Software Engineer on the Live API Infrastructure team, you'll design, build, and operate the backend serving systems that power Google Cloud Vertex Live API product. You'll own core components of live API stack end-to-end — driving reliability, latency, and scalability for high-QPS production workloads, integrating new Gemini live models, and supporting the customer-facing API. You'll partner with model-serving, API, QA eval and product teams, participate in production on-call, and help shape the team's technical direction. The Google Cloud AI Research team addresses AI challenges motivated by Google Cloud’s mission of bringing AI to tech, healthcare, finance, retail and many other industries. We work on a range of unique problems focused on research topics that maximize scientific and real-world impact, aiming to push the state-of-the-art in AI and share findings with the broader research community. We also collaborate with product teams to bring innovations to real-world impact that benefits our customers. Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. US: $174000 - $253000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits Learn more about benefits at Google. Responsibilities Design, build, and operate core Vertex Live API serving infrastructure end-to-end, integrating new Gemini Live models and features in partnership with cross-functional teams. Optimize high-QPS, low-latency streaming performance—driving down P99 latency, increasing throughput, and maintaining capacity headroom for traffic surges. Develop the Live API surface and support sidecar models to ensure a consistent, robust, and operable natural conversational experience for customers. Own production health by participating in on-call rotations, leading incident responses, and reducing operational toil through automation and observability. Elevate engineering standards through design/code reviews, while mentoring team members and shaping the technical roadmap.