Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Spanner Platform

In most instances, this position requires in-person interviews as part of the hiring process.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience working with distributed systems.
• Experience building software in backend or infrastructure.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with software engineering in C++.
• Experience building database software.
• Experience with solving problems at scale.
• Knowledge of database core concepts, including consistency and isolation.

About the job

Join Cloud Spanner, Google Cloud's database service at industry leading scale and reliability and one of the largest distributed systems in the world.

Spanner is a globally distributed relational database service that is widely used by most of Google’s products and services. Cloud Spanner is the cloud native offering of Spanner on Google Cloud Platform. It is a fully managed relational database with unlimited scale, strong consistency, and up to 99.999% availability.

The service health team's mission is to provide our customers with a predictable and robust experience at unmatched scale, no matter the size or shape of their workload. Scale, isolation and resiliency are the three pillars within the team that we focus on. As a member of the team, you will have the unique opportunity to make high impact to our biggest Cloud customers with a lot of large, ambiguous challenges to solve at scale.

This is a rare opportunity to be a member of a high impact, technically complex, distributed systems product. Spanner is widely used and recognized within and outside of Google (We won the 2025 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award award!). This is a great opportunity to work on one of the largest services in the world, solve problems at scale and be part of an amazing team.

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop features to support future scale, increase resiliency and isolation.
• Identify future bottlenecks through monitoring, experimenting and other signals and propose solutions.
• Collaborate with SRE and other partner teams to drive holistic solutions, often spanning multiple quarters and requiring cross team influence and strong communication skills.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.