Senior Staff Engineer Jobs in Sunnyvale, CA

• 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

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.

The Guest Platform team enhances Google Cloud’s customer experience by simplifying agent deployment for SAP and AI/ML workloads via Virtual Machine (VM) Extensions.

The Guest Ecosystem is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to unify its three core pillars—ContainerOS (COS), Guest OS, and Guest Platform—into a single product surface. Transitioning from "image maintenance" to building an automated OS substrate, this organization delivers the secure, optimized foundation powering Google Compute Engine (GCE) VMs, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Vertex AI, and major AI/ML workloads.

In this role, you will serve as the primary technical authority, owning the multi-year roadmap, leading fleet-wide migrations, and mentoring senior technical leads.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical goal and roadmap for the Operating System image portfolio. Align with organizational goals to support first-party/third-party customer needs, focusing on versioning, hardening, optimization, and platform integration.
• Establish testing frameworks to deliver out-of-the-box, qualified images across compute families. Monitor reliability via service level objective (SLOs), robust validation (security, compatibility), and incident management.
• Harden Operating System images, drive regular vulnerability scanning, and ensure timely patching to mitigate emerging threats.
• Partner with NPI teams to ensure Day-0 GCE compatibility and continuous validation on next-generation CPUs, TPUs, and GPUs.
• Collaborate with operating system vendors and open-source communities.