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, you will help solve important technical challenges, such as quickly and reliably delivering the best Search experience for local users in Africa. You will create and execute ideas that will better serve relevant and useful information to users, and set goals for how to re-image the entire online Search experience. You’ll build on and contribute to cutting-edge technologies that run Google Search, a product used by billions of users daily. You will collaborate with geographically dispersed teams within Search as well as partner product teams such as Android, Assistant, and YouTube to create an all-encompassing experience. You will use your technical knowledge to identify, build, monitor, maintain, and continuously improve features and infrastructure to enable and sustain Google Search success in Africa.

In Google Search, we’re reimagining what it means to search for information – any way and anywhere. To do that, we need to solve complex engineering challenges and expand our infrastructure, while maintaining a universally accessible and useful experience that people around the world rely on. In joining the Search team, you’ll have an opportunity to make an impact on billions of people globally.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Product Management, User Experience, Infrastructure, and other teams to identify opportunities, design, and build new features as well as improve existing features.
• Manage prototyping, live experimentation, iterating on search quality, leveraging and contributing to powerful technologies/infrastructure (e.g., NLP, Machine Learning), and maintenance of signals, models, and infrastructure.
• Collect and analyze the performance of features and platforms, including but not limited to reliability and latency, customer/ecosystem usage, experiments, and Machine Learning training data.
• Review code written by other engineers and provide feedback to ensure best practices (e.g., style guidelines, checking code in, accuracy, testability, and efficiency).
• Own end-to-end features from conception to launch.

Requirements

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Candidates will typically have 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages, and with data structures/algorithms.
• Typically 3 years of experience testing, maintaining, or launching software products, and 1 year of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Candidates will typically have 2 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Experience working with distributed systems at scale.
• Familiarity with Africa market or user expectations.
• Ability to work with new technology, develop and implement short and long-term creative solutions.
• Ability to quickly understand and extend/refactor code written by others.
• Excellent collaborating and people management skills to work within a cross-functional team.