Software Engineer, AI/ML, PhD, Early Career, 2026

Role Overview

As a PhD Software Engineer within the AI and Infrastructure (AI2) organization at Google Cloud, you will use your specialized research expertise to solve complex, real-world problems on an unprecedented scale. You will design, test, deploy, and maintain software solutions, engaging in innovative projects spanning areas like AI/ML, networking, data storage, security, and distributed systems to power essential services like Search and YouTube.

Responsibilities

• Write product or system development code.
• Collaborate with peers and stakeholders through design and code reviews to ensure best practices.
• Contribute to existing documentation or educational content.
• Triage product or system issues and debug/track/resolve by analyzing sources of issues.
• Implement solutions in specialized ML areas, utilize ML infrastructure, and contribute to model optimization and data processing.

Requirements

• PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 1 year of experience with Speech/audio, reinforcement learning, ML infrastructure, or other ML specializations.
• 1 year of experience with ML infrastructure (model deployment, evaluation, optimization, data processing, or debugging).
• Experience coding in Python, C++, C, Java, or Golang.

Nice to Have

• 2 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• Experience in algorithms, architecture, artificial intelligence, compilers, databases, data mining, distributed systems, machine learning, networking, or general systems.
• Demonstrated success in publishing peer-reviewed articles in prestigious conferences or journals (e.g., ICML, ICLR, ACL, KDD, SOSP, Nature).
• Availability to commence a full-time position in 2026.

Skills

• Python
• C++
• Machine Learning
• ML Infrastructure
• Distributed Systems