Software Engineer III, Performance

About the role

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 2 years of experience with software development in one or more programming

languages.

• 2 years of experience with computer architecture, performance analysis, and

performance modeling.

• Experience experimenting with AI agents or LLM-powered agentic workflows.

• Experience in systems engineering.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or related technical fields.

• Experience with low-level accelerator programming (e.g., CUDA, Triton,

Pallas) and performance tuning techniques.

• Experience with machine learning, compiler optimization, code generation, and

runtime systems for GPU architectures (OpenXLA, MLIR, Triton, etc).

• Debugging experience to improve performance of single-mode or multi-mode

(distributed) systems.

• Expertise in tailoring algorithms and ML models to exploit ML accelerator

architecture strengths and minimize weaknesses.

• Deep understanding of modern ML accelerator architectures (Nvidia/AMD GPUs,

TPUs, Trainium, Cerebras, etc.), memory hierarchies, and performance

bottlenecks.

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.

Our team is delivering state-of-the-art performance on OSS models to showcase

the capabilities TPUs, to both in industry competitions and to optimize these

models so our public customers can leverage the optimization recipes in their

own models.

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: $147000 - $210000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google

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

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Write product or system development code. Manually optimize models, using

state-of-the-art techniques (sharding, quantization, custom kernels).

• Develop principles from manual optimizations which can be automated via

agentic AI (e.g., compute, communication, scheduling, or quantization cost

models).

• Land identified principles and recipes to build scalable solutions, for

example, by collaborating with the compiler team on cost modeling or by

building agentic tooling for headroom analysis.

• Create scalable solutions to serve the third-party customer base by improving

out-of-the-box software performance and open-sourcing tooling to external

customers.

• Develop trend analysis to identify performance issues in yet-unseen models,

solving performance problems before they occur. While maintaining model

benchmarks to ensure tracking of performance wins.