Senior Staff Software Engineer, Content Safety

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience programming in Python or C++.
• 5 years of experience with design and architecture; and testing/launching software products.
• Experience managing software development pipelines.
• Experience in machine learning.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 8 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• Experience in responsible AI or safety-adjacent fields, such as factuality or product policy.
• Experience in scaling pipelines, deploying global-scale systems, and designing defensive architecture to meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Understanding of both machine learning and how large language models (LLMs) work including high-level concepts of transformers, activations, and training and deploying them at scale.

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 Content Safety team protects Google’s users from exposure to offensive, sensitive, and potentially harmful content.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction for our Singapore-based team while collaborating with technical leadership across the global organization. You will be accountable for delivering high-quality, performant, and future-proof solutions that combine safety protections with production-grade infrastructure.

Our team leverages deep subject matter expertise in content safety, advanced machine learning, and AI techniques, alongside serving infrastructure and product integrations. Through this work, we aim to protect users from harm, maintain Google’s participant edge in online safety, and ensure foundational models and the broader internet remain safe for society.

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

Responsibilities

• Be responsible for designing, building, maintaining, and scaling complex content safety solutions that utilize a variety of techniques including machine learning, large models, rules, vector databases, and content processing pipelines.
• Build solutions to safeguard Google's business-critical products, which includes protecting GenAI-based experiences on both server-side and on-device platforms.
• Perform the end-to-end process of model training, evaluation, and productionization, as well as establishing feedback loops to continuously improve model quality.
• Develop agentic workflows for understanding threats and moderating content, while also building rapid response capabilities to handle new and novel patterns of abuse.