Engineering Manager, Play Search and Quality

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, C, C++, Java, JavaScript)
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role; overseeing projects, with 2 years of experience in a people management, supervision/team leadership role.
• Experience with Machine Learning and Search Quality.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 3 years of experience working in a matrixed organization.

About the job

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.

The Play Search and Quality team is dedicated to optimizing the app discovery journey for billions of Play Store users. Our core mission is to make finding and installing high-quality apps and games an intuitive, engaging, and highly successful experience.

Our team manages the Play Store's entire search ecosystem, from Search Home to Search Results. Beyond search, we identify and promote high-quality apps and games across all Play Store surfaces and form factors globally. We develop ML and Gen-AI models to assess app quality, improving user experience and strengthening the Android ecosystem.

Google Play offers music, movies, books, apps and games for devices, powered by the cloud. It syncs across devices and on the web. As part of the Android and Mobile team, Googlers working on Google Play do everything from engineering our backend systems, to shaping product strategy, to forming great content partnerships. They make it possible for people to do things like buy an ebook or song on their Android phone, then have it instantly available on their laptop. The Google Play team enhances the Android ecosystem by giving developers and partners a premium store where they can reach millions of users.

Responsibilities

• Develop the mid-term technical outlook and roadmap within the scope of your team. Evolve the roadmap to meet anticipated future requirements and infrastructure needs.
• Design, guide and vet systems designs within the scope of the broader area, and write product or system development code to solve ambiguous problems.
• Write and review code, providing feedback to ensure the quality and maintainability of the codebase and to ensure practices (e.g., style guidelines, checking code in, accuracy, testability, and efficiency).
• Research, develop, and implement innovative AI/ML algorithms and models for Play Search.
• Develop human evaluation criteria and infrastructure to collect authoritative human rater data to assess app quality. Develop ML models to generalize the understanding of quality across millions of apps.