Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Spanner Platform

Google

Sunnyvale, California, United StatesFull-time$207,000–$300,000Posted Oct 16, 2026

About the role

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

[https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/benefits/].

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.

Responsibilities

  • Design and develop features that improve scale, resiliency, and isolation.
  • Identify future bottlenecks through monitoring, experimentation, and other signals, and propose solutions.
  • Collaborate with SRE and partner teams on cross-team solutions.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • 8 years of experience working with distributed systems.
  • Experience building backend or infrastructure software.
  • Preferred: experience with C++, database software, solving problems at scale, and database concepts such as consistency and isolation.

Benefits

  • 20% target bonus
  • Equity
  • Benefits

Skills mentioned

C++Distributed SystemsSystem DesignBackend DevelopmentDatabase DesignGoogle CloudCloud ComputingPerformance OptimizationConcurrencySQL

About Google

A problem isn't truly solved until it's solved for all. Googlers build products that help create opportunities for everyone, whether down the street or across the globe. Bring your insight, imagination and a healthy disregard for the impossible. Bring everything that makes you unique. Together, we can build for everyone. Check out our career opportunities at goo.gle/3DLEokh

Software Development10,001+ employeesMountain View, CA

H-1B sponsorship history

Historical employer filing data was found for Google. The employer record includes 57,181 historical certified applications. This is employer-level history, not a guarantee that this role currently offers sponsorship.