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Job Details
Posted date: Jun 05, 2026
Location: Kirkland, WA
Level: Director
Description
Drive the technical roadmap for Spanner’s search capabilities bridging the gaps with competitors and ensuring a seamless integration of full-text and vector search with Spanner’s query engine. Engage directly with key infra and enterprise customers to deeply understand their use cases, ensure smooth adoption of Spanner's search capabilities, and transform customer feedback into a clear search roadmap. Manage, mentor, and grow a team of talented software engineers, fostering innovative and high-performance engineering culture. Work with multiple functions and partner teams including the Spanner Indexing engineering team and also Product Managers, SRE, Engineering Productivity, UI, docs, and client libraries. Communicate effectively to executive stakeholders including L8+ Team Leads, Directors and VPs who are keenly interested in this space.Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.
With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.
Spanner is an industry leader for globally distributed operational databases, and we are rapidly evolving into a unified multi-model powerhouse that drives massive value for our customers. The Spanner Search team owns the outlook, architecture, and scale of native full-text, vector, and hybrid search capabilities built directly into the core Spanner engine.
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 - $301000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + bonus + equity + benefits
Learn more about benefits at Google.
Qualifications
Minimum qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 8 years of experience in software development, with 7 years of experience in building infrastructure, distributed systems, or core database internals. 5 years of experience in a people management role, leading and developing engineering teams within a technical environment. Experience with vector search, full text search, or query processing.Preferred qualifications: Experience designing, building, or operating large-scale search systems, information retrieval pipelines, or vector databases (e.g., Elasticsearch, Lucene, Pinecone, Milvus). Understanding of database engine internals, query execution/query optimization, or distributed data storage. Track record of navigating complex architectural trade-offs between performance, latency, and scale in an enterprise cloud environment.