Staff Software Engineer, Agent Development Kit

About the job

We are dedicated to simplifying the creation, deployment, and management of production-grade AI agents. By building and supporting a comprehensive, open-source, multi-language ecosystem highlighted by our Agent Development Kit (ADK) and related agentic protocols, we serve developers both inside and outside of Google. Our work is pivotal to forging a unified and powerful GenAI landscape for the entire developer community.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will drive the technical outlook, strategy, and architecture for the open-source components and tooling at the heart of our AI Agent ecosystem, including the Agent Development Kit (ADK). You will lead the design and development of foundational libraries, SDKs, and developer tools, handling ambiguous and complex challenges to enhance the end-to-end agent development life-cycle. This role requires deep technical leadership to influence and collaborate with internal, external, and cloud platform teams, shaping the road-map and ensuring seamless integration and deployment of AI agents. You will be a key technical voice, mentoring engineers, setting standards for engineering excellence, and driving long-term investments to scale the platform and empower a vibrant developer community.

The Google Cloud AI Research team addresses AI challenges motivated by Google Cloud’s mission of bringing AI to tech, healthcare, finance, retail and many other industries. We work on a range of unique problems focused on research topics that maximize scientific and real-world impact, aiming to push the state-of-the-art in AI and share findings with the broader research community. We also collaborate with product teams to bring innovations to real-world impact that benefits our customers.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architectural outlook, technical strategy, and roadmap for foundational, scalable, and extensible open-source libraries and SDKs within the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and related agentic protocols.
• Architect and lead the development of mission-critical tooling and infrastructure that improves the end-to-end AI agent development lifecycle (testing, debugging, deployment, observability), focusing on developer velocity, reliability, and scale.
• Lead technical engagement with key internal (1P) and external (3P) partners and customers.
• Provide technical leadership across the agent platform domain by handling the most ambiguous or complex technical challenges, mentoring junior engineers, advocating engineering excellence, and influencing technical direction through design reviews and setting team-wide standards.
• Identify and initiate long-term investments to reduce architectural complexity, improve system health, and unlock new capabilities for the AI agent ecosystem.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 8 years of experience programming in Java or Kotlin.
• 5 years of experience testing and launching software products.
  
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• Experience building AI-powered products featuring Generative AI technologies.
• Experience building and deploying solutions using various open source technologies.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
  
• Experience with one or more public cloud platforms.
• Experience as a core contributor, maintainer, or technical lead for well-regarded open-source software project(s).
• Experience in a technical leadership role, with a proven track record of leading project teams and setting technical direction across cross-functional and inter-team collaborations.
• Demonstrated track record of innovative ideas and excellent execution in the AI/ML space.